r 


N 


^NATURE 


THE   SUPERNATURAL, 


A8 


TOGETHER    CONSTITUTING 


THE    ONE    SYSTEM    OF    GOD. 


BY  HORACE  BUSHNELL. 


THIRD     EDTION. 

NEW    YOKK: 
CHARLES    SCRIBNER, 

124  GRAND   STREET 

1858. 


ENTXRID  according  to  Act  of  Congress,  in  the  year  1868,  by 
CHAELES    SCRIBNER, 

In  the  Clerk's  Office  of  the  District  Court  of  the  United  States 
for  the  Southern  District  of  New  Tork. 


H.    R.   HOBBS,    STEREOTYPER,    HARTFORD,   OOMM 


PREFACE. 


THE  treatise  here  presented  to  the  public  was  written,  as  regards 
the  matter  of  it,  some  years  ago.  It  has  been  ready  for  the  press 
more  than  two  years,  and  has  been  kept  back,  by  the  limitations  I 
am  under,  which  have  forbidden  my  assuming  the  small  additional 
care  of  its  publication.  It  need  hardly  be  said  that  the  subject 
has  been  carefully  studied,  as  any  subject  rightfully  should  be, 
that  raises,  for  discussion,  the  great  question  of  the  age. 

Scientifically  measured,  the  argument  of  the  treatise  is  rather 
an  hypothesis  for  the  matters  in  question,  than  a  positive  theory  of 
them.  And  yet,  like  every  hypothesis,  that  gathers  in,  accommo- 
dates, and  assimilates,  all  the  facts  of  the  subject,  it  gives,  in  that 
one  test,  the  most  satisfactory  and  convincing  evidence  of  its  prac- 
tical truth.  Any  view  which  takes  in  easily,  all  the  facts  of  a  sub- 
ject, must  be  substantially  true.  Even  the  highest  and  most  diffi- 
cult questions  of  science  are  determined  in  this  manner.  While  it 
is  easy  therefore  to  raise  an  attack,  at  this  or  that  particular  point, 
call  it  an  assumption,  or  a  mere  caprice  of  invention,  or  a  paradox, 
or  a  dialectically  demonstrable  error,  there  will  yet  remain,  after 
all  such  particular  denials,  the  fact  that  here  is  a  wide  hypothesis 
of  the  world,  and  the  great  problem  of  life,  and  sin,  and  super- 
natural redemption,  and  Christ,  and  a  christly  Providence,  and  a 
divinely  certified  history,  and  of  superhuman  gifts  entered  into  the 


iy  PEEFACE. 

world,  and  finally  of  God  as  related  to  all,  which  liquidates  these 
stupendous  facts,  in  issue  between  Christians  and  unbelievers,  and 
gives  a  rational  account  of  them.  And  so  the  points  that  were 
assaulted,  and  perhaps  seemed  to  be  carried,  by  the  skirmishes  of 
detail,  will  be  seen,  by  one  who  grasps  the  whole  in  which  they 
are  comprehended,  to  be  still  not  carried,  but  to  have  the*r  reason 
certified  by  the  more  general  solution  of  which  they  are  a  part. 
One  who  flies  at  mere  points  of  detail,  regardless  of  the  whole  to 
which  they  belong,  can  do  nothing  with  a  subject  like  this.  The 
points  themselves  are  intelligible  only  in  a  way  of  comprehension, 
or  as  being  seen  in  the  whole  to  which  they  are  subordinate. 

It  will  be  observed  that  the  words  of  scripture  are  often  cited, 
and  its  doctrines  referred  to,  in  the  argument.  But  this  is  never 
done  as  producing  a  divine  authority  on  the  subject  in  question. 
It  is  very  obvious  that  an  argument,  which  undertakes  to  settle  the 
truth  of  scripture  history,  should  not  draw  on  that  history  for  its 
proofs.  The  citations  in  question  are  sometimes  designed  to  correct 
mistakes,  which  are  held  by  believers  themselves,  and  are  a  great 
impediment  to  the  easy  solution  of  scripture  difficulties;  some- 
times they  are  offered  as  furnishing  conceptions  of  subjects,  that 
are  difficult  to  be  raised  in  any  other  manner ;  sometimes  they  are 
presented  because  they  are  clear  enougb,  in  their  superiority,  to 
stand  by  their  own  self-evidence  and  contribute  their  aid,  in  that 
manner,  to  the  general  progress  of  the  argument. 

I  regret  the  accidental  loss  of  a  few  references  that  could  not 
be  recovered,  without  too  much  labor.  H.  B. 


CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER  I. 

INTRODUCTORY— QUESTION  STATED. 

MANKIND  naturally  predisposed  to  believe  in  supernatural  facts,  13.  Neolo- 
gists  spring  up,  whom  the  Greeks  called  Sophists,  14.  The  Romans 
had  their  Sophists  also,  15.  And  now  the  turn  of  Christianity  is  come, 
16.  The  naturalism  of  our  day  reduces  Christianity  to  a  myth,  in  the 
same  way,  17.  This  issue  is  precipitated  by  modern  science,  19.  With 
tokens,  on  all  sides,  adverse  to  Christianity,  21.  First,  we  have  the  athe- 
istic school  of  Mr.  Hume,  22.  Next,  Pantheism,  23.  Next,  the  Phys- 
icalists,  represented  by  Phrenology,  23.  The  naturalistic  characters  of 
Unitarianism,  24.  The  Associationists,  24.  The  Magnetic  necromancy, 
25.  The  classes  mostly  occupied  with  the  material  laws  and  forces,  25. 
Modern  politics,  26.  The  popular  literature,  28.  Evangelical  teachers 
fall  into  naturalism,  without  being  aware  of  it,  28.  But  we  undertake 
no  issue  with  science,  29.  Our  object  is  to  find  a  legitimate  place  for  the 
supernatural,  as  included  in  the  system  of  God,  31.  And  this,  with  an 
ultimate  reference  to  the  authentication  of  the  gospel  history,  32. 

CHAPTER    II. 

DEFINITIONS — NATURE   AND  THE   SUPERNATURAL. 

Nature  defined,  36.  The  supernatural  defined,  37.  Do  not  design  to 
limit,  or  deny  the  propriety  of  other  uses,  38.  Definition  makes  us  su- 
pernatural beings  ourselves,  42.  Our  supernatural  action  illustrated,  43. 
We  operate  supernaturally,  by  making  new  conjunctions  of  causes,  45. 
Not  acted  on  ourselves,  by  causes  that  are  efficient  through  us,  46.  Not 
scale-beams,  in  our  will,  as  governed  necessarily  by  the  strongest  mo- 
tive, 47.  In  wrong,  we  consciously  follow  the  weakest  motive,  49.  The 
other  functions  of  the  soul,  exterior  to  the  will,  are  a  nature,  51.  Atlan- 
tic Monthly  on  executive  limitations  of  power,  53.  And  yet  we  are  con- 
scious, none  the  less,  of  liberty,  55.  Self-determination  indestructible,  56. 
Hence  the  honor  we  put  on  heroes  and  martyrs,  57.  If  we  act  supernat- 
urally, why  not  also  God?  59.  Not  enough  that  God  acts  in  the  causes 
of  nature,  60. 


CHAPTER   III. 

NATURE  IS  NOT  THE  SYSTEM  OF  GOD — THINGS  AND  POWERS,  HOW  RELATED. 

Nature  oppresses  our  mind,  at  first,  by  her  magnitudes,  64.  Men,  after  all, 
demand  something  supernatural,  66.  Hence  the  appetite  we  discover, 
for  the  demonstrations  of  necromancy,  67.  Shelly,  the  atheist,  makes  a 
mythology,  67.  The  defect  of  our  new  literature,  that  it  has  and  yields 
no  inspiration.  63.  The  agreement  of  so  many  modes  of  naturalism, 
signifies  nothing,  "Because  they  have  no  agreement  among  themselves.  70. 

1* 


yi  CONTENTS. 

Familiarized  to  the  subordination  of  causes  in  nature,  that  we  may  not 
be  disturbed  by  the  same  fact  in  religion,  72.  Strauss  takes  note  of  this 
fact  when  denying  the  possibility  of  miracles,  74.  Geology  shows  that 
God  thus  subordinates  nature,  on  a  large  scale,  76.  In  the  creation 
of  so  many  new  races,  in  place  of  the  extinct  races,  77.  He  crea- 
ted their  germs,  78.  But  man  must  have  been  created  in  maturity,  79. 
The  development  theory  inverts  all  the  laws  of  organic  and  inorganic 
substance,  81.  The  aspect  of  nature  indicates  interruptive  and  clashing 
forces,  that  are  not  in  the  merely  mineral  causes,  83.  Distinction  of 
Things  and  Powers,  84.  Both  fully  contrasted,  86.  Nature  not  the  uni- 
verse, 86.  A  subordinate  part  or.  member  of  the  great  universal  sys- 
tem, 87.  The  principal  interest  and  significance  of  the  universe  is  in  the 
powers,  89. ! 

CHAPTER  IV. 

PROBLEM  OP  EXISTENCE,  AS  BELATED  TO  THE  FACT  OF  SIN. 

The  world  of  nature,  a  tool-house  for  the  practice  and  moral  training  of 
powers,  91.  Their  training,  a  training  of  consent,  which  supposes  a 
power  of  non-consent,  i.  e.  sin,  92.  Possibility  of  evil  necessarily  in- 
volved, 93.  No  limitation  of  omnipotence,  94.  Why,  then,  does  God 
create  with  such  a  possibility  ?  95.  May  be  God's  plan  to  establish  in 
holiness,  in  despite  of  wrong,  96.  No  breach  of  unity  involved  in  his 
plan,  98.  The  real  problem  of  existence  is  character,  or  the  perfection 
of  liberty,  99.  Which  require  a  trial  in  society,  100.  And  this  an  em- 
bodiment in  matter,  101.  Will  the  powers  break  loose  from  God,  as  they 
may?  103.  God  desires  no  such  result,  104.  When  it  comes,  no  sur- 
prise upon  His  plan,  or  annihilation  of  it,  105.  Illustrated  by  the  found- 
ing of  a  school,  105.  No  causes  of  sin,  only  conditions  privative,  107. 
What  is  meant  by  the  term,  109.  First  condition  privative — defect  of 
knowledge,  110.  Have  all  categorical,  but  no  experimental  knowledge, 
111.  The  subject  guilty,  as  having  the  former,  without  the  latter,  114. 
Second  condition  privative — unacquainted  with  law,  and  therefore  un- 
qualified for  liberty,  117.  A  kind  of  prior  necessity,  therefore,  that  he 
be  passed  through  a  twofold  economy,  119.  Discover  this  twofold  econ- 
omy in  other  matters,  120.  A  third  condition  privative,  as  regards  social 
exposure  to  the  irruptions  of  bad  powers,  123.  This  fact  admitted  by 
the  necromancers,  125.  Sin  then  can  not  be  accounted  for,  128.  No 
validity  in  the  objection,  that  God  has  been  able  to  educate  angels  with- 
out sin,  129.  Proof- text  in  Jude  explained  by  Faber,  130.  No  objec- 
tion lies,  that  sin  is  made  a  necessary  means  of  good,  133.  The  exist- 
ence of  Satan  explained,  or  conceived,  134.  The  supremacy  of  God  not 
diminished,  but  increased,  by  an  eternal  purpose  to  reduce  the  bad  possi- 
bility, 137. 

CHAPTER   V. 

THE   FACT  OF  SIN. 

All  naturalism  begins  with  some  professed,  or  tacitly  assumed,  denial  of  the 
fact  of  sin,  142.  On  this  point.  Mr.  Parker  is  ambiguous,  143.  Fourier 
charges  all  evil  against  society,  145.  Dr.  Strauss,  all  against  the  individ- 
ual, and  none  against  society,  146.  The  popular,  pantheistic  literature 
denies  the  fact  of  sin,  148.  Appeal  to  observation  for  evidence,  149 


CONTENTS.  VU 

We  blame  ourselves,  as  wrong-doers,  151.  Our  demonstrations  show  us 
to  be  exercised  by  the  consciousness  of  sin,  154.  We  act  on  the.  suppo- 
sition that  sin  is  ever  to  be  expected,  dreaded,  provided  against,  156. 
Forgiveness  supposes  the  fact,  159.  So  the  pleasure  we  take  in  satire,  160. 
So  the  feeling  of  sublimity  in  the  tragic  sentiment,  161.  Solutions  of- 
fered by  naturalists,  insufficient  and  futile,  162.  They  call  it  "misdirec' 
tion,"  but  it  is  self-misdirection,  therefore  sin,  163. 


CHAPTER    VI. 

THE   CONSEQUENCES   OF  SIN. 

Sin  has  two  forces,  a  spiritual  and  a  dynamic,  165.  By  the  latter  as  a 
power  of  disturbance  among  causes,  it  raises  storms  of  retribution  against 
itself,  166.  It  also  makes  new  conjunctions  of  causes,  that  are  destruct- 
ive and  disorderly,  169.  So  that  nature  answers  to  it  with  groans,  170. 
Thus  it  is  with  all  the  four  great  departments  of  life,  and  first,  with  the 
soul,  or  with  souls,  172.  No  law  or  function  is  discontinued,  but  all  its 
{unctions  are  become  irregular  and  discordant,  173.  Similar  effects  in 
the  body,  or  in  bodies,  174.  Hence  disease,  and,  to  some  extent,  certainly, 
mortality  itself,  176,  Society  is  disordered  by  inheritance,  through  the 
principle  of  organic  unity  involved  in  propagation,  177.  Objection  con- 
sidered, that  God,  in  this  way,  does  not  give  us  a  fair  opportunity,  178. 
Two  modes  of  production  possible ;  by  propagation,  and  by  the  direct  cre- 
ation of  each  man,  179.  The  mode  by  propagation,  with  all  its  disad- 
vantages of  hereditary  corruption,  shown  to  be  greatly  preferable,  179. 
And  yet,  in  this  manner,  society  becomes  organically  disordered,  183. 
Similar  effects  of  mischief  in  the  material  world,  186.  Not  true  that 
nature,  as  we  know  it,  represents  the  beauty  of  God,  187.  Swedenborg 
holds  that  God  creates  through  man,  188.  And  somehow  it  is  clear  that 
the  creation  becomes  a  type  of  man,  as  truly  as  of  God,  189.  Battle 
of  the  ants,  191.  Deformities  generally,  consequences  of  sin,  191.  Not 
true  that  they  are  introduced  to  make  contrasts  for  beauty,  193. 


CHAPTER   VII. 

ANTIdPATTVE   CONSEQUENCES. 

We  find  disorder,  prey,  deformity,  in  the  world,  before  man's  arrival — what 
account  shall  be  made  of  such  a  fact  ?  194,  There  are  two  modes  of 
consequences,  the  subsequent,  which  are  physical  effects,  and  the  antici- 
pative,  which  respect  the  same  facts  before  the  time,  196.  Propose  now 
the  question  of  the  anticipative  consequences,  198.  Evil  beings  in  the 
world,  before  the  arrival  of  man ;  how  far  disorders  in  it  may  be  due  to 
the  effect  of  their  sin,  199.  Anticipative  consequences  just  as  truly  con- 
sequences, as  those  which  come  after,  200.  Intelligence  must  give  to- 
kens beforehand  of  what  it  perceives,  201.  Agassiz  and  Dana — premed- 
itations and  prophetic  types,  202.  Such  anticipative  tokens  necessary,  to 
show  that  God  understands  his  empire  beforehand,  205.  The  more  im- 
pressive, that  they  are  fresh  creations,  to  a  great  extent,  as  shown  by  Mr. 
Agassiz,  207.  Misshapen  forms  shown  by  Hugh  Miller  to  increase,  as  the 
era  of  man  approaches — as  in  the  serpent  race  and  many  kinds  of  fishes, 
208.  God  will  moderate  the  pride  of  science,  thus,  by  the  faots  of 
science,  210.  The  world  as  truly  a  conaltts,  as  an  existing  fact,,  211 


Viil  CONTENTS. 

The  Pantheistic  naturalism  gives  a  different  account  of  these  deformi- 
ties, 211.  "Which  account  neither  meets  our  want,  nor  even  explains  the 
iacts,  212.  Sin  is  seen  to  be  a  very  great  fact,  as  it  must  be,  if  it  is  any 
thing,  214.  Objection  considered,  that  there  was  never,  hi  this  view, 
any  real  kosmos  at  all,  215.  Unnature  is  the  grand  result  of  sin,  216. 
The  bad  miracle  has  transformed  the  world,  218. 


CHAPTER   VIII. 

NO  BEMEDY  IN  DEVELOPMENT,  OR  SELF-REFORMATION. 

Two  rival  gospels,  221.  The  first,  which  is  development,  or  the  progress 
of  the  race,  will  not  restore  the  fall  of  sin,  221.  No  race  begins  at  the 
savage  state,  and  in  that  state  there  is  no  root  of  progress,  223.  All  the 
advanced  races  appear,  more  or  less  distinctly,  to  have  had  visitations  of 
supernatural  influence,  225.  If  there  is  a  law  of  progress,  why  are  so 
many  races  degraded  or  extirpated  ?  226.  The  first  stage  of  man  is  a 
crude  state,  and  the  advanced  and  savage  races  are  equally  distant  from 
it,  227.  Geology  shows  that  God  does  not  mend  all  disasters  by  devel- 
opment, 227.  Healing  is  not  development,  228.  Generally  associated 
with  supernatural  power,  of  which  it  is  the  type,  230.  No  one  dares,  in 
iact,  to  practically  trust  the  development  principle,  whether  in  the  state 
or  in  the  family,  232.  The  second  rival  gospel  proposes  self-reformation 
or  self-culture,  with  as  little  ground  of  hope,  234.  No  will-practice,  or 
ethical  observance,  can  mend  the  disorder  of  souls,  235.  These  can  not 
restore  harmony,  236.  Nor  liberty,  236.  The  only  sufficient  help,  or 
reliance,  is  God,  237.  There  is  really  no  speculative  difficulty  in  the  dis- 
abilities of  sin,  238.  Even  Plato  denies  the  possibility  of  virtue,  by  any 
mere  human  force,  241.  Seneca,  Ovid,  Zenophanes,  to  the  same  effect,  244. 
Plato,  Strabo,  Pliny,  all  indicate  a  want  of  some  supernatural  light,  or  rev- 
elation, 245.  The  conversion  of  Clement  shows  the  fact  in  practical  ex- 
hibition, 246. 


CHAPTER   IX. 

THE    SUPERNATURAL    COMPATIBLE   WITH    NATURE  AND  SUBJECT  TO  FIXED 

LAWS. 

The  world  is  a  thing,  into  which  all  the  powers  may  rightfully  act  them- 
selves, 250.  Children  at  the  play  of  ball,  a  good  image  of  this  higher  truth, 
251.  Not  the  true  doctrine  of  a  supernatural  agency,  that  God  acts 
through  nature,  254.  Did  not  so  act  in  producing  the  new  races  of  ge- 
ology, 254.  Office  of  nature,  as  being  designed  to  mediate  the  effects  im- 
plied in  duties  and  wrongs,  255.  Nature  the  constant,  and  the  super- 
natural, the  variable  agency,  257.  God  really  governs  the  world,  and  by 
a  supernatural  method,  258.  Without  this  he  has  no  liberty  in  nature, 
more  than  if  it  were  a  tomb,  259.  Manifestly  we  want  a  God  living  and 
acting  now,  260.  And  yet  all  this  action  of  God,  supposes  no  contraven- 
tion of  laws,  261.  Reasons  why  this  is  inadmissible,  261.  Several  kinds 
of  law,  but  all  agree  in  supposing  the  character  of  uniformity,  262.  Thus 
we  have  natural  law  and  moral  law,  but  God's  supernatural  action  not 
determined  by  these,  is  submitted  always  to  the  law  of  his  end,  264. 
His  end  being  always  the  same,  he  will  be  as  exactly  submitted  to  it  as 
nature  to  her  laws,  266.  No  returning  here  into  the  same  circle  na  in 


CONTENTS.  IX 

nature,  but  a  perpetually  onward  motion,  266.  What  occurs  but  once 
here,  is  done  by  a  fixed  law,  269.  Many  of  the  laws  of  the  Spirit  we 
know,  270.  The  idea  of  superiority  in  nature,  as  being  uniform  cor- 
rected 271.  Also,  the  impression  of  a  superior  magnitude  in  nature, 
273. 


CHAPTEE   X. 

THE  CHARACTER  OF  JESUS  FORBIDS   HIS  POSSIBLE  CLASSIFICATION  WITH  MEN. 

The  superhuman  personality  of  Christ  is  fully  attested  by  his  character,  277. 
And  the  description  verifies  itself,  277.  Represented  as  beginning  with 
a  perfect  childhood.  278.  Which  childhood  is  described  naturally,  and 
without  exaggerations  of  fancy,  280.  Represented  always  as  an  inno- 
cent being,  yet  with  no  loss  of  force,  283  His  piety  is  unrepentant,  yet 
successfully  maintained,  285.  He  united  characters  which  men  are  never 
able  to  unite  perfectly,  286.  His  amazing  pretensions  are  sustained  so  as 
never  even  to  shock  the  skeptic,  288.  Excels  as  truly  in  the  passive  vir- 
tues, 292.  Bears  the  common  trials,  in  a  faultless  manner  of  patience,  293. 
His  passion,  as  regards  the  time,  and  the  intensity,  is  not  human,  295. 
His  undertaking  to  organize,  on  earth,  a  kingdom  of  God,  is  superhu- 
man, 298.  His  plan  is  universal  in  tune,  300.  He  takes  rank  with  the 
poor,  and  begins  with  them  for  his  material,  301.  Becoming  the  head 
thus  of  a  class,  he  never  awakens  a  partisan  feeling,  304.  His  teachings 
are  perfectly  original  and  independent,  306.  He  teaches  by  no  human  or 
philosophic  methods,  308.  He  never  veers  to  catch  the  assent  of  multi- 
tudes, 308.  He  is  comprehensive,  in  the  widest  sense,  309.  He  is  per- 
fectly clear  of  superstition  in  a  superstitious  age,  311.  He  is  no  liberal, 
yet  shows  a  perfect  charity,  312.  The  simplicity  of  his  teaching  is  perfect, 
314.  His  morality  is  not  artificial  or  artistic,  316.  He  is  never  anxious 
for  his  success,  317.  He  impresses  his  superiority  and  his  real  greatness 
the  more  deeply,  the  more  familiarly  he  is  known,  318.  Did  any  such 
character  exist,  or  is  it  a  myth,  or  a  human  invention?  323.  Is  the  char- 
acter sinless  ?  324.  Mr.  Parker  and  Mr.  Hennel  think  him  imperfect,  326. 
Answer  of  Milton  to  one  of  their  accusations,  329.  How  great  a  matter 
that  one  such  character  has  lived  in  our  world,  331. 


CHAPTER   XI. 

CHRIST  PERFORMED  MIRACLES. 

Miracles  do  not  prove  the  gospel,  but  the  problem  itself  is  to  prove  the 
miracles,  333.  General  assumption  of  the  skeptics,  that  miracles  are  in- 
credible— Spinoza,  Hume,  Strauss,  Parker,  334.  Miracles  defined,  335. 
What  miracle  is  not,  337.  Some  concessions  noted  of  the  deniers  of 
miracles — Hennel,  339.  Also  of  Dr.  Strauss,  340.  His  solution  of  the 
immediate  and  the  mediate  action  of  God,  341.  Proofs — That  the  super- 
natural action  of  man  involves  all  the  difficulties,  345.  That  sin  is  near 
in  appearance  to  a  miracle,  346.  That  nature,  assumed  to  be  perfect  and 
not  to  be  interrupted  by  God,  is  in  fact  become  unnature  already,  348. 
That  without  something  equivalent,  the  restoration  of  man  is  impossi- 
ble, 348.  That  nature  was  never  designed  to  be  the  complete  empire  of 
God,  349.  That  if  God  has  ever  done  any  thing  he  may  as  well  do  a 
niracle  now,  350.  Then  He  is  shown,  even  by  science,  to  have  performed 


:  CONTENTS. 

miracles,  350.  But  the  great  proof  is  Jesus  himself;  having  power, 
without  suspending  any  law  of  nature,  351.  On  an  errand  high  enough 
to  justify  miracles,  353.  It  is  also  significant  that  the  deniers  can  make 
no  account  of  the  history,  which  is  at  all  rational — Strauss,  355.  Mr. 
Parker  concedes  the  fact  that  Christ  himself  is  a  miracle,  357.  Objection 
— why  not  also  maintain  the  ecclesiastical  miracles  ?  359.  That  accord- 
ing to  our  definition  there  may  be  false  miracles,  360.  That  if  they  are 
credible  in  a  former  age,  they  also  should  be  now,  361.  That  miracles 
are  demonstrations  of  force,  363.  But  we  rest  in  Jesus  the  chief  mira- 
cle, 365. 


CHAPTER   XII. 

WATER-MARKS  IN  THE  CHRISTIAN  DOCTRINE. 

The  most  convincing  evidence,  that  which  is  already  on  baud,  as  in  water- 
mark, undiscovered,  367.  Principal  evidence  of  the  kind,  the  two  econo- 
mies, letter  and  spirit,  as  being  inherently  necessary,  368.  Overlooked 
by  our  philosophers,  369.  More  nearly  discerned  by  the  heathen,  370. 
Once  thought  of  as  necessary,  the  necessity  is  seen,  372.  Scriptures  an- 
ticipate all  human  wisdom  here,  373.  And,  in  this  precedence,  we  dis- 
cover that  they  are  not  of  man,  375.  Another  strong  proof  in  the  gos- 
pels, not  commonly  observed,  that  the  supernatural  fact  of  the  incarna- 
tion is  so  perfectly  and  systematically  carried  out,  376.  There  is  no  such 
concinnity  of  facts  in  any  of  the  mythological  supernaturalisms,  376.  It 
appears  in  a  multitude  of  points,  as  in  the  name,  gospel,  377.  In  the 
name,  salvation,  378.  In  salvation  by  faith,  379.  In  justification  by 
faith,  381.  In  the  setting  up  of  a  kingdom  of  God  on  earth,  384.  In 
the  doctrine  of  the  Holy  Spirit  and  his  works,  as  related  to  Christ 
and  his,  385.  In  the  doctrine  of  spiritual  regeneration,  388.  In  the 
sacred  mystery  of  the  Trinity,  391.  Hence  Napoleon,  Hennel,  and  oth- 
ers, express  their  admiration  of  the  compactness  and  firm  order  of  Chris- 
tianity, 396.  Whence  came  this  close,  internal  adaptation  of  parts  in  a 
matter  essentially  miraculous?  397.  Only  rational  supposition,  that  the 
fabric  is  all  of  God,  as  it  pretends  to  be,  399.  May  see  in  Mormonism, 
Mohammedanism,  and  Romanism,  what  man  can  do  in  compounding  su- 
pernaturals,  400. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

THE   WORLD  IS  GOVERNED    SUPERNATURALLY,    IN    THE    INTEREST  OP  CHRIS- 
TIANITY. 

There  is  but  one  God,  who,  governing  the  world,  must  do  it  coincidently 
with  what  he  is  doing  in  Christ,  405.  And  this  Christ  himself  boldly 
affirms,  406.  Two  kinds  of  Providence,  the  natural  and  supernatural — 
nature  the  fixed  term  between  us  and  God,  407.  And  then  there  is  a  vari- 
able mode,  in  which  we  come  into  reciprocal  relation  with  God — this  is 
the  supernatural,  408.  And  in  this  field,  God  rules  for  Christianity's  sake, 
409.  The  evidences  are,  first,  that  things  do  not  take  place  as  they 
should,  if  the  effects  of  sin  were  left  to  the  endless  propagation  of  causes, 
411.  Hence  then,  while  the  great  teachers  of  the  world  and  their  schools 
disappear,  Christianity  remains,  412.  Itself  an  institution,  in  the  very 


CONTENTS.  XI 

current  of  the  flood,  414.  A  second  evidence,  that  the  events  of  the 
world  show  a  divine  hand,  even  that  of  Christ  bearing  rule,  415.  The 
Jewish  dispersion,  the  Greek  philosophy  already  waning,  the  Greek 
tongue  every  where,  the  Roman  Empire  universal,  a  state  of  general 
peace,  and  so  the  way  of  Christ  is  made  ready,  417.  So  with  the  events 
that  followed,  418.  But  what  of  the  dark  ages,  and  other  adverse  facts? 
421.  Enough  that  this  mystery  of  iniquity  must  work,  till  the  gospel  is 
proved  out,  422.  Some  events  confessedly  dark,  and  yet  they  might  be 
turned  to  wear  a  look  of  advantage,  if  only  we  could  fathom  their 
import,  425.  A  third  evidence,  in  the  spiritual  changes  wrought  in 
men — difficult  to  change  a  character,  428.  The  cases  of  Paul,  Augustine, 
and  others,  431.  The  changes  are  facts ;  if  Christianity  did  not  work 
them,  a  supernatural  Providence  did,  for  Christianity's  sake,  434.  Not 
changed  by  their  own  ideas,  436.  Not  by  theologic  preconceptions — case 
of  a  short-witted  person — Brainard's  conjurer,  &c.,  437.  More  satisfac- 
tory to  conceive  these  results  to  be  wrought  by  the  Holy  Spirit,  which 
comes  to  really  the  same  thing,  440.  How  the  critics  venture,  with 
great  defect  of  modesty,  to  show  the  subjects  of  such  changes,  that  they 
misconceive  their  experience,  443. 

CHAPTER   IIT. 

MIRACLES  AND  SPIRITUAL  OUTS  ARE  NOT  DISCONTINUED. 

If  miracles  are  inherently  incredible,  nothing  is  gained  by  thrusting  them 
back  and  cutting  them  short  in  time,  447.  The  closing  up  of  the  canon, 
no  reason  of  discontinuance,  448.  Certainly  not  discontinued,  fur  this 
reason,  in  the  days  of  Chrysostom,  448.  There  have  been  suspensions, 
here  and  there,  but  no  discontinuance,  449.  Does  not  follow  that  they 
will  occur,  in  later  times,  in  the  exact  way  of  the  former  times,  450. 
The  reason  of  miracles,  in  that  oscillation  toward  extremes,  which  be- 
longs to  the  state  of  sin,  452.  First,  we  swing  toward  reason,  order, 
uniformity ;  next,  toward  fanaticism,  453.  Hence  almost  every  appear- 
ance of  supernatural  gifts,  that  we  can  trace,  has  come  to  its  end  in  some 
kind  of  excess,  455.  Why  it  is  that  lying  wonders  are  generally  con- 
temporaneous, 456.  The  first  thing  impressed  by  investigation  here,  that 
miracles  could  not  have  ceased  at  any  given  date — no  such  date  can  be 
found,  which  they  do  not  pass  over,  460.  Newman  and  the  ecclesiastical 
miracles,  460.  Miracles  of  the  "Scots  Worthies,"  461.  Les  Trembleurs 
des  Cevennes,  or  French  prophets,  462.  Les  Convulsionnaires  de  Saint 
Medard,  462.  George  Fox's  miracles,  and  those  of  the  Friends,  463. 
Abundance  of  such  facts  in  our  own  time,  as  in  premonitions,  answers  to 
prayer,  healings,  tongues,  of  the  MacDonalds  and  the  followers  of  Irving, 
467.  Case  of  Miss  Fancourt,  467.  Not  true  that  the  verdict  of  the 
thinking  men  of  our  day  is  to  decide  such  a  question,  468.  The  thinking 
men  can  make  nothing  of  Joan  of  Arc,  of  Cromwell,  and  many  other 
well-attested  characters,  472.  But  why  do  we  only  hear  of  such  at  a 
distance  ? — why  not  meet  the  persons,  see  the  facts  ?  474.  We  do — Cap- 
tain Yonnt's  dream,  475.  The  testing  of  prayer  by  a  physician,  477. 

Appear  to  have  had  the  tongues  in  H ,  and  other  gifts,   478.    Case  of 

healing  by  an  English  disciple,  479.  Case  of  a  diseased  cripple  made 
whole,  483.  The  visit  of  a  prophet,  486.  Obliged  to  admit  that,  while 
such  gifts  are  wholly  credible,  they  are  not  so  easily  believed  by  one 
whose  mind  is  preoccupied  by  a  contrary  habit  of  expectation,  491. 


Xll  CONTENTS. 

CHAPTER   XV. 

CONCLUSION  STATED — USES  AND  RESULTS. 

Argument  recapitulated,  493.  It  does  not  settle,  or  at  all  move  the  ques- 
tion of  inspiration,  but  sets  the  mind  in  a  position  to  believe  inspiration 
easily,  495.  The  mythical  hypothesis  virtually  removed,  without  any 
direct  answer,  496.  Have  not  proved  all  the  miracles,  but  miracles — let 
every  one  discuss  the  particular  questions  for  himself;  497.  Objection 
that  every  thing  is  thus  surrendered,  498.  Relation  of  the  argument  to 
Mr.  Parker's,  499.  Particularly  to  his  view  of  natural  inspiration,  501. 
The  argument,  if  carried,  will  also  afiect  the  estimate  held  of  natural  the- 
ology, or  modify  the  place  given  it,  505.  And  preserve  the  positive  in- 
stitutions by  showing  a  rational  basis  for  their  authority,  509.  And 
correct  that  false  ambition  of  philanthropy,  which  dispenses  with  Chris- 
tianity as  the  regenerative  institution  of  God,  512.  And  restore  the  true 
apostolic  idea  of  preaching,  514.  And  require  intellectual  and  moral 
philosophy  to  raise  the  great  problem  of  existence,  and  recognize  the  fact 
of  sin  and  supernatural  redemption,  516.  And,  last  of  all,  will  give  to 
faith  and  Christian  experience  that  solid  basis  on  which  they  may  be  ex- 
pected to  unfold  greater  results,  520. 


CHAPTER  I. 

INTRODUCTORY-QUESTION  STATED. 

Ix  the  remoter  and  more  primitive  ages  of  the  world, 
sometimes  called  mythologic,  it  will  be  observed  that  man- 
kind, whether  by  reason  of  some  native  instinct  as  yet 
uncorrupted,  or  some  native  weakness  yet  uneradicated, 
are  abundantly  disposed  to  believe  in  things  supernatural. 
Thus  it  was  in  the  extinct  religions  of  Egypt,  Phoenicia, 
Greece,  and  Rome ;  and  thus  also  it  still  is  in  the  existing 
mythologic  religions  of  the  East.  Under  this  apparently 
primitive  habit  of  mind,  we  find  men  readiest,  in  fact,  to 
believe  in  that  which  exceeds  the  terms  of  mere  nature ; 
in  deities  and  apparitions  of  deities,  that  fill  the  heavens 
and  earth  with  their  sublime  turmoil ;  in  fates  and  furies ; 
in  nymphs  and  graces ;  in  signs,  and  oracles,  and  incanta- 
tions ;  in  "  gorgons  and  chimeras  dire."  Their  gods  are 
charioteering  in  the  sun,  presiding  in  the  mountain  tops, 
rising  out  of  the  foam  of  the  sea,  breathing  inspirations 
in  the  gas  that  issues  from  caves  and  rocky  fissures,  loos- 
ing their  rage  in  the  storms,  plotting  against  each  other 
in  the  intrigues  of  courts,  mixing  in  battles  to  give 
success  to  their  own  people  or  defeat  the  people  of 
some  rival  deity.  All  departments  and  regions  of  the 
world  are  full  of  their  miraculous  activity.  Above 
ground,  they  are  managing  the  thunders;  distilling  in 
showers,  or  settling  in  dews;  ripening  or  blasting  the 
harvests ;  breathing  health,  or  poisoning  the  air  with  pesti- 
lential infections.  In  the  ground  they  stir  up  volcanic 

fires,  and  wrestle  in  earthquakes  that  shake  down  cities. 

2 


14  THE    GKEEK    SOPHISTS 

In  the  deep  world  underground,  they  receive  the  ghosts  of 
departed  men,  and  preside  in  Tartarean  majesty  over  the 
realms  of  the  shades.  The  unity  of  reason  was  nothing 
to  these  Gentiles.  They  had  little  thought  of  nature  as 
an  existing  scheme  of  order  and  law.  Every  thing  was 
supernatural.  The  universe  itself,  in  all  its  parts,  was 
only  a  vast  theater  in  which  the  gods  and  demigods  were 
acting  their  parts. 

But  there  sprung  up,  at  length,  among  the  Greeks,  some 
four  or  five  centuries  before  the  time  of  Christ,  a  class  of 
speculative  neologists  and  rationalizing  critics,  called  Soph- 
ists, who  began  to  put  these  wild  myths  of  religion  to  the 
test  of  argument.  If  we  may  trust  the  description  of 
Plato,  they  were  generally  men  without  much  character, 
either  as  respects  piety  or  even  good  morals ;  a  conceited 
race  of  Illuminati,  who  more  often  scoffed  than  argued 
against  the  sacred  things  of  their  religion.  Still  it  was  no 
difficult  thing  for  them  to  shake,  most  effectually,  the  con- 
fidence of  the  people  in  schemes  of  religion  so  intensely 
mythical.  And  it  was  done  the  more  easily  that  the  more 
moderate  and  sober  minded  of  the  Sophists  did  not  pro- 
pose to  overthrow  and  obliterate  the  popular  religion,  but 
only  to  resolve  the  mythic  tales  and  deities  into  certain 
great  facts  and  powers  of  nature ;  and  so,  as  they  pretended, 
to  find  a  more  sober  and  rational  ground  of  support  for 
their  religious  convictions.  In  this  manner  we  are  in- 
formed that  one  of  their  number,  Eumerus,  a  Cyrenian, 
"resolved  the  whole  doctrine  concerning  the  gods  into  a 
history  of  nature."  * 

The  religion  of  the  Eomans,  at  a  later  period,  under- 
went a  similar  process,  and  became  an  idle  myth,  having 

*  Neander,  Vol.  I.,  p.  6. 


AND    THEIR    TIMES.  15 

no  earnest  significance  and  as  little  practical  authority  in 
the  convictions  of  the  people.  And,  when  Christ  came, 
the  Sadducees  were  practicing  on  the  Jewish  faith  in  much 
the  same  way.  As  philosophy  entered,  religion  was  fall- 
ing everywhere  before  its  rationalizing  processes.  It  was 
poetry  on  one  side  and  dialectics  on  the  other ;  and  the 
dialectics  were,  in  this  case,  more  than  a  match  for  the 
poetry, — as  they  ever  must  be,  until  their  real  weakness 
and  the  cheat  of  their  pretensions  are  discovered.  What 
the  Christian  father,  Justin  Martyr,  says  of  the  Sophists 
of  his  time,  was  doubtless  a  sufficiently  accurate  account 
of  the  others  in  times  previous,  and  may  be  taken  as  a 
faithful  picture  of  the  small  residuum  of  religious  convic- 
tion left  by  them  all.  "They  seek,"  he  says,  "to  con- 
vince us  that  the  divinity  extends  his  care  to  the  great 
whole  and  to  the  several  kinds,  but  not  to  me  and  to  you, 
not  to  men  as  individuals.  Hence  it  is  useless  to  pray  to 
him ;  for  every  thing  occurs  according  to  the  unchange- 
able law  of  an  endless  cycle."* 

Or,  we  may  take  the  declaration  of  Pliny,  from  the  side 
of  the  heathen  philosophy  itself,  though  many  were  not 
ready  to  go  the  same  length,  preferring  to  retain  religion, 
which  they  oftener  called  superstition,  as  a  good  instru- 
ment for  the  state  and  useful  as  a  restraint  upon  the  com- 
mon people.  He  says : — "  All  religion  is  the  offspring  of 
necessity,  weakness,  and  fear.  What  God  is,  if  in  truth 
he  be  any  thing  distinct  from  the  world,  it  is  beyond  the 
compass  of  man's  understanding  to  know."  f 

Thus,  between  the  destructive  processes  of  reason  enter- 
ing on  one  side  to  demolish,  and  Christianity  on  the  other 

*  Neander,  VoL  I.,  p.  9.  f  Neander,  VoL  L,  p.  10. 


16  THE    CHRISTIAN    SOPHISTS, 

to  offer  itself  as  a  substitute,  the  old  mythologic  religions 
fell,  and  were  completely  swept  away. 

And  now,  at  last,  the  further  question  comes,  viz., 
whether  Christianity  itself  is  also,  in  its  turn,  to  experi- 
ence the  same  fate,  and  be  exterminated  by  the  same  or  a 
closely  similar  process?  Is  it  now  to  be  found  that  Chris- 
tianity is  only  another  form  of  myth,  and  is  it  so  to  be  re- 
solved into  the  mere  "history  of  nature,"  as  the  other  re- 
ligions were  before  it  ?.  Is  it  now  to  be  discovered  that  the 
prophecy  and  miracle  of  the  Old  Testament,  and  all  the 
formally  historic  matters  even  of  the  gospels  and  epistles 
of  the  New,  are  reducible  to  mere  natural  occurrences, 
"  under  the  unchangeable  laws  of  an  endless  cycle  ? " 
Is  this  process  now  to  end  in  the  discovery,  beyond 
which  there  can  be  no  other,  that  God  himself  is,  in 
truth,  nothing  "distinct  from  the  world?  " 

This  is  the  new  infidelity:  not  that  rampant,  crude- 
minded,  and  malignant  scoffing  which,  in  a  former  age, 
undertook  to  rid  the  world  of  all  religion ;  on  the  contrary, 
it  puts  on  the  air  and  speaks  in  the  character  of  a  genuine 
scholarship  and  philosophy.  It  simply  undertakes,  if  we 
can  trust  its  professions,  to  interpret  and  apply  to  the  facts 
of  scripture  the  true  laws  of  historic  criticism.  It  more 
generally  speaks  in  the  name  of  religion,  and  does  not 
commonly  refuse  even  the  more  distinctive  name  of  Chris- 
tianity. Coming  thus  in  shapes  of  professed  deference  to 
revealed  religion,  many  persons  appear  to  be  scarcely 
aware  of  the  questions  it  is  raising,  the  modes  of  thought 
it  is  generating,  and  the  general  progress  toward  mere 
naturalism  it  is  beginning  to  set  in  motion.  Many,  also, 
are  the  more  effectually  blinded  to  the  tendency  of  the 


OR    NATURALIZING    CRITICS.  17 

times,  that  so  many  really  true  opinions  and  so  many  right 
sentiments,  honorable  to  God  and  religion,  are  connected 
with  the  pernicious  and  false  method  by  which  it  is,  in  one 
way  or  another,  extinguishing  the  faith  of  religion  in  the 
world.  It  proposes  to  make  a  science  of  religion,  and 
what  can  be  more  plausible  than  to  have  religion  become 
a  science  ? 

It  finds  a  religious  sentiment  in  all  men,  which,  in  one 
view,  is  a  truth.  It  finds  a  revelation  of  God  in  all  things, 
which  also  is  a  truth.  It  discovers  a  universal  inspiration 
of  God  in  human  souls ;  which,  if  it  be  taken  to  mean 
that  they  are  inherently  related  to  God,  and  that  God,  in 
the  normal  state,  would  be  an  illuminating,  all-moving 
presence  in  them,  is  likewise  a  truth.  It  rejoices  also  in 
the  discovery  of  great  and  good  men,  raised  up  in  all 
times  to  be  seers  and  prophets  of  God ;  which,  again,  is 
not  impossible,  if  we  take  into  account  the  possibility  of  a 
really  supernatural  training  or  illumination,  outside  of  the 
Jewish  cultus ;  as  in  the  case  of  Jethro,  Job,  and  Cornelius, 
including  probably  Socrates  and  many  others  like  him, 
who  were  inwardly  taught  of  God  and  regenerated  by  the 
private  mission  of  his  Spirit. 

But  exactly  this  the  new  infidelity  can  not  allow.  All 
pretenses  of  a  supernatural  revelation,  inspiration,  or  ex- 
perience, it  rejects ;  finding  a  religion,  beside  which  there 
is  no  other,  within  the  terms  of  mere  nature  itself;  a  uni- 
versal, philosophic,  scientific  religion.  In  this  it  luxuri- 
ates, expressing  many  very  good  and  truly  sublime  senti- 
ments ;  sentiments  of  love,  and  brotherhood,  and  worship , 
quoting  scripture,  when  it  is  convenient,  as  it  quotes  the 
Orphic  hymns,  or  the  Homeric  and  Sybilline  verses,  and 
testifying  the  profoundest  admiration  to  Jesus  Christ,  in 

2* 


18  PRESENT    TENDENCIES, 

common  with  Numa,  Plato,  Zoroaster,  Confucius,  Moham- 
med, and  others ;  and  perhaps  allowing  that  he  is,  on  the 
whole,  the  highest  and  most  inspired  character  that  has 
ever  yet  appeared  in  the  world.  All  this,  on  the  level  of 
mere  nature,  without  miracle,  or  incarnation,  or  resurrec- 
tion, or  new-creation,  or  any  thing  above  nature.  Such 
representations  are  only  historic  myths,  covering  perhaps 
real  truths,  but,  as  regards  the  historic  form,  incredible. 
Nothing  supernatural  is  to  be  admitted.  Redemption  it- 
self, considered  as  a  plan  to  raise  man  up  out  of  thraldom, 
under  the  corrupted  action  of  nature, — rolling  back  its 
currents  and  bursting  its  constraints, — is  a  fiction.  There 
is  no  such  thraldom,  no  such  deliverance,  and  so  far  Chris- 
tianity is  a  mistake ;  a  mistake,  that  is,  in  every  thing  that 
constitutes  its  grandeur  as  a  plan  of  salvation  for  the 
world. 

We  have  heard  abundantly  of  these  and  such  like  aber- 
rations from  the  Christian  truth  in  Germany,  and  also  in 
the  literary  metropolis  of  our  own  country.  But  we  have 
not  imagined  any  general  tendency,  it  may  be,  in  this 
direction,  as  a  peculiarity  of  our  times.  If  so,  we  have  a 
discovery  to  make ;  for,  though  it  may  not  be  true  that 
any  large  proportion  of  the  men  of  our  times  have  dis- 
tinctly and  consciously  accepted  this  form  of  unbelief,  yet 
the  number  of  such  is  rapidly  increasing,  and,  what  is 
worse,  the  number  of  those  who  are  really  in  it,  without 
knowing  it,  is  greater  and  more  rapidly  increasing  still. 
The  current  is  this  way,  and  the  multitudes  or  masses  of 
the  age  are  falling  into  it.  Let  us  take  our  survey  of  the 
forms  of  doubt  or  denial  that  are  converging  on  this  com- 
mon center  and  uniting,  as  a  common  force,  against  the 
faith  of  any  thing  supernatural,  and  so  against  the  possi- 


CREATED    BY    SCIENCE,  19 

bility,  in  fact,  of  Christianity  as  a  gospel  of  salvation  to 
the  world. 

From  the  first  moment  or  birth-time  of  modern  science, 
if  we  could  fix  the  moment,  it  has  been  clear  that  Chris- 
tianity must  ultimately  come  into  a  grand  issue  of  life  and 
death  with  it,  or  with  the  tendencies  embodied  in  its  pro- 
gress. Not  that  Christianity  has  any  conflict  with  the 
facts  of  science,  or  they  with  it.  On  the  contrary,  since 
both  it  and  nature  have  their  common  root  and  harmony 
in  God,  Christianity  iS  the  natural  foster-mother  of  science, 
and  science  the  certain  handmaid  of  Christianity.  And 
both  together,  when  rightly  conceived,  must  constitute  one 
complete  system  of  knowledge.  But  the  difficulty  is  here ; 
that  we  see  things  only  in  a  partial  manner,  and  that  the 
two  great  modes  of  thought,  or  intellectual  methods,  that 
of  Christianity  in  the  supernatural  department  of  God's 
plan,  and  that  of  science  in  the  natural,  are  so  different 
that  a  collision  is  inevitable  and  a  struggle  necessary  to 
the  final  liquidation  of  the  account  between  them;  or, 
what  is  the  same,  necessary  to  a  proper  settlement  of  the 
conditions  of  harmony. 

Thus,  from  the  time  of  Galileo's  and  Newton's  discove- 
ries, down  to  the  present  moment  of  discovery  and  research 
in  geological  science,  we  have  seen  the  Christian  teach- 
ers stickling  for  the  letter  of  the  Christian  documents  and 
alarmed  for  their  safety,  and  fighting,  inch  by  inch  and 
with  solemn  pertinacity,  the  plainest,  most  indisputable  or 
even  demonstrable  facts.  On  the-  other  side,  the  side  of 
science,  multitudes,  especially  of  the  mere  dilettanti,  have 
been  boasting,  almost  every  month,  some  discovery  that 
was  to  make  a  fatal  breach  upon  revealed  religion. 


20  OR   THE    METHOD    OF    SCIENCE. 

And  a  much  greater  danger  to  religion  is  to  be  appre- 
hended from  science  than  this,  viz.,  the  danger  that  comes 
from  what  may  be  called  a  bondage  under  the  method  of 
science, — as  if  nothing  could  be  true,  save  as  it  is  proved 
by  the  scientific  method.  Whereas,  the  method  of  all  the 
higher  truths  of  religion  is  different,  being  the  method  of 
faith ;  a  verification  by  the  heart,  and  not  by  the  notions 
of  the  head. 

Busied  in  nature,  and  profoundly  engrossed  with  her 
phenomena,  confident  of  the  uniformity  of  her  laws, 
charmed  with  the  opening  wonders  revealed  in  her  pro- 
cesses, armed  with  manifold  powers  contributed  to  the 
advancement  of  commerce  and  the  arts  by  the  discovery 
of  her  secrets,  and  pressing  onward  still  in  the  inquest, 
with  an  eagerness  stimulated  by  rivalry  and  the  expecta- 
tion of  greater  wonders  yet  to  be  revealed, — occupied  in 
this  manner,  not  only  does  the  mind  of  scientific  men  but 
of  the  age  itself  become  fastened  to,  and  glued  down  upon, 
nature;  conceiving  that  nature,  as  a  frame  of  physical 
order,  is  itself  the  system  of  God ;  unable  to  imagine  any 
thing  higher  and  more  general  to  which  it  is  subordinate. 
Imprisoned,  in  this  manner,  by  the  terms  and  the  method 
of  nature,  the  tendency  is  to  find  the  whole  system  of  God 
included  under  its  laws ;  and  then  it  is  only  a  part  of  the 
same  assumption  that  we  are  incredulous  in  regard  to  any 
modification,  or  seeming  interruption  of  their  activity, 
from  causes  included  in  the  supernatural  agency  of  per- 
sons, or  in  those  agencies  of  God  himself  that  complete 
the  unity  and  true  system  of  his  reign.  And  so  it  comes  to 
pass  that,  while  the  physical  order  called  nature  is  perhaps 
only  a  single  and  very  subordinate  term  of  that  universal 
divine  system,  a  mere  pebble  chafing  in  the  ocean-bed  of 


THE    REVISION    PREPARING.  21 

its  eternity,  we  refuse  to  believe  that  this  pebble  can  be 
acted  on  at  all  from  without,  requiring  all  events  and 
changes  in  it  to  take  place  under  the  laws  of  acting  it  has 
inwardly  in  itself.  There  is  no  incarnation  therefore,  no 
miracle,  no  redemptive  grace,  or  experience;  for  God's 
system  is  nature,  and  it  is  incredible  that  the  laws  of 
nature  should  be  interrupted ;  all  which  is  certainly  true, 
if  there  be  no  higher,  more  inclusive  system  under  which 
it  may  take  place  systematically,  as  a  result  even  of  sys- 
tem itself. 

And  exactly  this  must  be  the  understanding  of  mankind, 
at  some  future  time,  when  the  account  between  Christianity 
and  nature  shall  have  been  fully  liquidated.  When  that 
point  is  reached,  it  will  be  seen  that  the  real  system  of  God 
includes  two  parts,  a  natural  and  a  supernatural,  and  it 
will  no  more  be  incredible  that  one  should  act  upon  the 
other,  than  that  one  planet  or  particle  in  the  department 
of  nature  should  act  upon  and  modify  the  action  of  another. 
But  we  are  not  yet  ready  for  a  discovery  so  difficult  to  be 
made.  Thus  far  the  tendency  is  visible,  on  every  side,  to 
believe  in  nature  simply,  and  in  Christianity  only  so  far  as 
it  conforms  to  nature  and  finds  shelter  under  its  laws.  And 
the  mind  of  the  Christian  world  is  becoming,  every  day, 
more  and  more  saturated  with  this  propensity  to  natural- 
ism ;  gravitating,  as  it  were,  by  some  fixed  law,  though 
imperceptibly  or  unconsciously,  toward  a  virtual  and  real 
unbelief  in  Christianity  itself;  for  the  Christianity  that  is 
become  a  part  only  of  nature,  or  is  classified  under  nature, 
is  Christianity  extinct.  That  we  may  see  how  far  the  mind 
of  an  age  is  infected  by  this  naturalizing  tendency,  let  us 
note  a  few  of  the  thousand  and  one  forms  in  which  it 
appears. 


22        ATHEISM    NATURALISTIC,     OF    COURSE. 

First  we  have  the  relics  of  the  old  school  of  denial  and 
atheism,  headed  most  conspicuously  by  Mr.  Hume  and  the 
French  philosophers.  All  atheists  are  naturalists  of  neces- 
sity. And  atheism  there  will  be  in  the  world  as  long  as 
sin  is  in  it.  If  the  doctrine  dies  out  as  argument,  it  will 
remain  as  a  perverse  and  scoffing  spirit.  Or  it  will  be  re- 
produced in  the  dress  of  a  new  philosophy.  Dying  out  as 
a  negation  of  Hobbes  or  Hume,  it  will  reappear  in  the 
positive  and  stolidly  physical  pretendership  of  Comte. 
But,  whatever  shape  or  want  of  shape  it  takes,  destructive 
or  positive, — a  doctrine  or  a  scoffing,  a  thought  of  the  head 
or  a  distemper  of  the  passions, — it  will  of  course  regard  a 
supernatural  faith  as  the  essence  of  all  unreason. 

Still  it  can  not  be  said  that  the  negations  of  Mr.  Hume 
are  gone  by,  as  long  as  they  are  assumed  and  practically 
held  as  fundamental  truths,  by  many  professed  teachers 
of  Christianity ;  for  it  is  remarkable  that  our  most  recent 
and  most  thorough-going  school  of  naturalists,  or  natural- 
izing critics  in  the  Christian  scriptures,  really  place  it  as 
the  beginning  and  first  principle  of  criticism,  that  no 
miracle  is  credible  or  possible.  This  they  take  by  assump- 
tion, as  a  point  to  be  no  longer  debated,  after  the  famous 
argument  of  Hume.  The  works  of  Strauss,  Hennel,  New- 
man, Froude,  Fox,  Parker,  all  more  or  less  distinguished 
for  their  ability,  as  for  their  virtual  annihilation  of  the 
gospels,  are  together  rested  on  this  basis.  They  are  not 
all  atheists;  perhaps  none  of  them  will  admit  that  distinc- 
tion ;  some  of  them  even  claim  to  be  superlatively  Chris- 
tian. But  the  assault  upon  Christianity,  in  which  they 
agree,  is  the  one  from  which  the  greatest  harm  is  now  to 
be  expected,  and  that,  in  great  part,  for  the  reason  that 
they  do  not  acknowledge  the  true  genealogy  of  their  doc- 


PANTHEISTS    AND    PHRENOLOGISTS.  23 

trine,  and  that,  hovering  over  the  gulf  that  separates  athe- 
ism from  Christianity,  they  take  away  faith  from  one,  with- 
out exposing  the  baldness  and  forbidding  sterility  of  the 
other.  They  have  many  apologies  too,  in  the  unhappy 
incumbrances  thrown  upon  the  Christian  truth  by  its  de- 
fenders, which  makes  the  danger  greater  still. 

Next  we  have  the  school  or  schools  of  pantheists ;  who 
identify  God  and  nature,  regarding  the  world  itself  and  its 
history  as  a  necessary  development  of  God,  or  the  con- 
sciousness of  God.  Of  course  there  is  no  power  out  of 
nature  and  above  it  to  work  a  miracle ;  consequently  no 
revelation  that  is  more  than  a  development  of  nature. 

Next  in  order  comes  the  large  and  vaguely-defined  body 
of  physicalists,  who,  without  pretending  to  deny  Chris- 
tianity, value  themselves  on  finding  all  the  laws  of  obliga- 
tion, whether  moral  or  religious,  in  the  laws  of  the  body 
and  the  world.  The  phrenologists  are  a  leading  school  in 
this  class,  and  may  be  taken  as  an  example  of  the  others. 
Human  actions  are  the  results  of  organization.  Laws  of 
duty  are  only  laws  of  penalty  or  benefit,  inwrought  in  the 
physical  order  of  the  world ;  and  Combe  "  On  the  Con- 
stitution of  Man  "  is  the  real  gospel,  of  which  Christianity 
is  only  a  less  philosophic  version.  Thousands  of  persons 
who  have  no  thought  of  rejecting  Christianity  are  sliding 
continually  into  this  scheme,  speaking  and  reasoning  every 
hour  about  matters  of  duty,  in  a  way  that  supposes  Chris- 
tianity to  be  only  an  interpreter  of  the  ethics  of  nature, 
and  resolving  duty  itself,  or  even  salvation,  into  mere  pru- 
dence, or  skill ; — a  learning  to  walk  among  things,  so  as 
not  to  lose  one's  balance  and  fall  or  be  hurt;  or,  when  it 
is  lost,  finding  how  to  recover  and  stand  up  again. 

Closely  related  to  these,  or  else  included  among  them, 


24    ETHICAL    CONCEPTIONS    OF    UNITARIANS. 

we  are  to  reckon,  with  some  exceptions,  the  very  intelli- 
gent, influential  body  of  Unitarian  teachers  of  Christianity. 
Maintaining,  as  they  have  done  with  great  earnestness,  the 
truth  of  the  scripture  miracles,  they  furnish  a  singular  and 
striking  illustration  of  the  extent  to  which  a  people  may 
be  slid  away  from  their  speculative  tenet,  by  the  practical 
drift  of  what  may  be  called  their  working  scheme.  Deny- 
ing human  depravity,  the  need  of  a  supernatural  grace 
also  vanishes,  and  they  set  forth  a  religion  of  ethics,  instead 
of  a  gospel  to  faith.  Their  word  is  practically,  not  re- 
generation, but  self-culture.  There  is  a  good  seed  in  us, 
and  we  ought  to  make  it  grow  ourselves.  The  gospel 
proposes  salvation ;  a  better  name  is  development.  Christ 
is  a  good  teacher  or  interpreter  of  nature,  and  only  so  a 
redeemer.  God,  they  say,  has  arranged  the  very  scheme 
of  the  world  so  as  to  punish  sin  and  reward  virtue ;  there- 
fore, any  such  hope  of  forgiveness  as  expects  to  be  deliv- 
ered of  the  natural  effects  of  sin  by  a  supernatural  and 
regenerative  experience,  is  vain;  because  it  implies  the 
failure  of  God's  justice  and  the  overturning  of  a  natural 
law.  Whoever  is  delivered  of  sin,  must  be  delivered  by 
such  a  life  as  finally  brings  the  great  law  of  justice  on  his 
side.  To  be  justified  freely  by  grace  is  impossible.* 

Again,  the  myriad  schools  of  Associationists  take  it  as 
a  fundamental  assumption,  whether  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously, that  human  nature  belongs  to  the  general  order 
of  nature,  as  it  comes  from  God,  and  that  nothing  is  want- 
ing to  the  full  perfection  of  man's  happiness,  but  to  have 
society  organized  according  to  nature,  that  is  scientifically. 
No  new-creation  of  the  soul  in  good,  proceeding  from  a  point 
above  nature,  is  needed  or  to  be  expected.  The  propensi- 

*  Dewey's  Sermon  on  Retribution. 


ASSOCIATIONISTS    AND    MAGNETISTS.          25 

ties  and  passions  of  men  are  all  right  now;  "attractions 
are  proportioned  to  destinies  "  in  them,  as  in  the  planets. 
What  is  wanted,  therefore,  is  not  the  supernatural  redemp- 
tion of  man,  but  only  a  scientific  reorganization  of 
society. 

Next  we  have  the  magnetists  or  seers  of  electricity, 
opening  other  spheres  and  conditions  of  being  by  electric 
impacts,  and  preparing  a  religion  out  of  the  revelations  of 
natural  clairvoyance  and  scientific  necromancy ;  the  more 
confident  of  the  absurdity  of  the  Christian  supernaturalism, 
or  the  plan  of  redemption  by  Christ,  that  they  have  been  so 
mightily  illuminated  by  the  magnetic  revelations.  They  are 
greatly  elated  also  by  other  and  more  superlative  discove- 
ries, in  the  planets  and  third  heavens  and  the  two  superior 
states ;  boasting  a  more  perfect  and  fuller  opening  of  tho 
other  world  than  even  Christianity  has  been  able  to  make. 

Again  it  will  be  observed  that  almost  any  class  of  men, 
whose  calling  occupies  them  much  with  matter  and  its 
laws,  have  always,  and  now  more  than  ever,  a  tendency  to 
merely  naturalistic  views  of  religion.  This  is  true  of  phy- 
sicians. Continually  occupied  with  the  phenomena  of  the 
body,  and  its  eifects  on  the  mind,  they  are  likely,  without 
denying  Christianity,  to  reduce  it  practically  to  a  form  of 
naturalism.  So  of  the  large  and  generally  intelligent  class 
of  mechanics.  Having  it  for  the  occupation  and  principal 
study  of  life  to  adjust  applications  of  the  great  laws  of 
chemistry  and  dynamics,  and  exercised  but  little  in  sub- 
jects and  fields  of  thought  external  to  mere  nature,  they 
very  many  of  them  come  to  be  practical  unbelievers  in 
every  thing  but  nature.  They  believe  in  cause  and  effect, 
and  are  likely  to  be  just  as  much  more  skeptical  in  regard 
to  any  higher  and  better  faith.  Active-minded,  ingenious, 


2t>  MATERIAL    ENGAGEMENTS. 

and  sharp,  but  restricted  in  the  range  of  their  exercise, 
they  surrender  themselves,  in  great  numbers,  to  a  feeling 
of  unreality  in  every  thing  but  nature. 

Again  the  tendency  of  modern  politics,  regarded  as 
concerned  with  popular  liberty,  is  in  the  same  direction. 
Civil  government  is  grounded,  as  the  people  are  every  day 
informed  by  their  leaders,  with  airs  of  assumed  statesman- 
ship, in  a  social  compact;  a  pure  fiction,  assumed  to 
account  for  whole  worlds  of  fact ;  for  every  body  knows 
that  no  such  compact  was  ever  formed,  or  ever  supposed 
to  be,  by  any  people  in  the  world.  It  has  the  advantage, 
nevertheless,  of  accounting  for  the  political  state,  atheisti- 
cally,  under  mere  nature;  and  is,  therefore,  the  more 
readily  accepted,  though  it  really  accounts  for  nothing. 
For  if  every  subject  in  the  civil  state  were  in  it  as  a  real 
contractor,  joining  and  subscribing  the  contract  himself, 
what  is  there  even  then  to  bind  him  to  his  contract,  save 
that,  in  the  last  degree,  he  is  bound  by  the  authority  of 
God  and  the  sanctions  of  religion.  Besides  there  never 
can  be,  in  this  view,  any  such  thing  as  legislation,  but 
only  an  extended  process  of  contracting ;  for  legislation 
is  the  enactment  of  laws,  and  laws  have  a  morally  binding 
authority  on  men,  not  as  contractors,  but  as  subjects.  It 
seems  to  be  supposed  that  this  doctrine  of  a  social  compact 
has  some  natural  agreement  with  popular  institutions, 
where  laws  are  enacted  by  a  major  vote;  whereas  the 
major  supposes  a  minor,  non-assenting  vote ;  and  as  this 
minor  vote  has  been  always  a  fact,  from  first  to  last,  the 
compact  theory  fails,  after  all,  to  show  how  majorities  get 
a  right  to  govern  that  is  better,  even  theoretically,  than 
the  right  of  any  single  autocrat.  There  is,  in  fact,  no  con- 
ceivable basis  of  civil  authority  and  law,  which  does  not 


POLITICS    AND    PROGRESS.  27 

recognize  the  state,  as  being,  in  this  form  or  in  that,  a  crea- 
tion of  Providence  and,  as  Providence  manages  the  world 
in  the  interest  of  redemption,  a  fact  supernatural ;  which 
does  not  recognize  the  state  as  God's  minister  in  the  super- 
natural works  and  ends  of  his  administration — appointed 
by  him  to  regulate  the  tempers,  restrain  the  passions,  re- 
dress the  wrongs,  shield  the  persons,  and  so  to  conserve 
the  order  of  a  fallen  race,  existing  only  for  those  higher 
aims  which  he  is  prosecuting  in  their  history.  Still  we 
are  contriving,  always,  how  to  get  some  ground  of  civil 
order  that  separates  it  wholly  from  God.  A  social  com- 
pact, popular  sovereignty,  the  will  of  the  people,  any 
thing  that  has  an  atheistic  jingle  in  the  sound  and  stops  in 
the  plane  of  mere  nature  best  satisfies  us.  We  renounce, 
in  this  manner,  our  true  historic  foster-mother,  religion, 
taking  for  the  oracle  and  patron  saint  of  our  politics  Jean 
Jacques  Rousseau.  And  the  result  is  that  the  immense 
drill  of  our  political  life,  more  far-reaching  and  powerful 
than  the  pulpit,  or  education,  or  any  protest  of  argument, 
operates  continually  and  with  mournful  certainty  against 
the  supernatural  faith  of  Christianity.  Hence  too  it  is  that 
we  hear  so  much  of  commerce,  travel,  liberty,  and  the 
natural  spread  of  great  inventions,  as  causes  that  are  start- 
ing new  ideas,  and  must  finally  emancipate  and  raise  all 
the  nations  of  mankind.  In  which  it  seems  to  be  sup- 
posed that  there  is  even  a  law  of  self-redemption  in  society 
itself.  As  if  these  external  signs  or  incidents  of  progress 
were  its  causes  also ;  or  as  if  they  were  themselves  un- 
caused by  the  supernatural  and  quickening  power  of  Christ. 
Whether  Christianity  can  finally  survive  this  death-damp 
of  naturalism  in  our  political  and  social  ideas,  remains  to 
be  seen. 


28  REIGNING    LITERATURE. 

I  have  only  to  add,  partly  as  a  result  of  all  these 
causes,  and  partly  as  a  joint  cause  with  them,  that  the 
popular  literature  of  the  times  is  becoming  generally  satur- 
ated with  naturalistic  sentiments  of  religion.  The  litera- 
ture of  no  other  age  of  the  world  was  ever  more  religious  in 
the  form,  .only  the  religion  of  it  is,  for  the  most  part,  rather 
a  substitute  for  Christianity  than  a  tribute  to  its  honor ; — 
a  piracy  on  it,  as  regards  the  beautiful  and  sublime  pre- 
cepts of  ethics  it  teaches,  but  a  scorner  only  the  more 
plausible  of  whatever  is  necessary  to  its  highest  authority, 
as  a  gift  from  God  to  the  world.  It  praises  Christ,  as  great 
or  greatest  among  the  heroes;  finds  a  God  in  the  all, 
whom  it  magnifies  in  imposing  pictures  of  sublimity ;  re- 
joices in  the  conceit  of  an  essential  divinity  in  the  soul 
and  its  imaginations ;  dramatizes  culture,  sentiment,  and 
philanthropy ;  and  these,  inflated  with  an  airy  scorn  of  all 
that  implies  redemption,  it  offers  to  the  world,  and 
especially  to  the  younger  class  of  the  world,  as  a  more 
captivating  and  plausible  religion. 

To  pursue  the  enumeration  further  is  unnecessary. 
"What  we  mean  by  a  discussion  of  the  supernatural  truth 
of  Christianity  is  now  sufficiently  plain.  We  undertake 
the  argument  from  a  solemn  conviction  of  its  necessity, 
and  because  we  see  that  the  more  direct  arguments  and 
appeals  of  religion  are  losing  their  power  over  the  public 
mind  and  conscience.  This  is  true  especially  of  the  young, 
who  pass  into  life  under  the  combined  action  of  so  many 
causes,  conspiring  to  infuse  a  distrust  of  whatever  is  super- 
natural in  religion.  Persons  farther  on  in  life  are  out  of 
the  reach  of  these  new  influences,  and,  unless  their  atten- 
tion is  specially  called  to  the  fact,  have  little  suspicion  of 
what  is  going  on  in  the  mind  of  the  rising  classes  of  the 


ORTHODOXY    NO    SECURITY.  29 

world, — more  and  more  saturated  every  day  with  this  in- 
sidious form  of  unbelief.  And  yet  we  all,  with  perhaps 
the  exception  of  a  few  who  are  too  far  on  to  suffer  it,  are 
more  or  less  infected  with  the  same  tendency.  Like  an 
atmosphere,  it  begins  to  envelope  the  common  mind  of  the 
world.  We  frequently  detect  its  influence  in  the  practical 
difficulties  of  the  young  members  of  the  churches,  who  do 
not  even  suspect  the  true  cause  themselves.  Indeed,  there 
is  nothing  more  common  than  to  hear  arguments  advanced 
and  illustrations  offered,  by  the  most  evangelical  preachera, 
that  have  no  force  or  meaning,  save  what  they  get  from 
the  current  naturalism  of  the  day.  We  have  even  heard 
a  distinguished  and  carefully  orthodox  preacher  deliver  a 
discourse,  the  very  doctrine  of  which  was  inevitable,  un- 
qualified naturalism.  Logically  taken  and  carried  out  to 
its  proper  result,  Christianity  could  have  had  no  ground 
of  standing  left, — so  little  did  the  preacher  himself  under- 
stand the  true  scope  of  his  doctrine,  or  the  mischief  that 
was  beginning  to  infect  his  conceptions  of  the  Christian 
truth. 

In  the  review  we  have  now  sketched,  it  may  easily  be 
seen  on  what  one  point  the  hostile  squadrons  of  unbelief 
are  marching.  Never  before,  since  the  inauguration  of 
Christianity  in  our  world,  has  any  so  general  and  moment- 
ous issue  been  made  with  it  as  this  which  now  engages 
and  gathers  to  itself,  in  so  many  ways,  the  opposing  forces 
of  human  thought  and  society.  Before  all  these  combina- 
tions the  gospel  must  stand,  if  it  stands ;  and  against  all 
these  must  triumph,  if  it  triumphs.  Either  it  must  yield, 
or  they  must  finally  coalesce  and  become  its  supporters. 

Do  we  undertake  then,  with  a  presumptuous  and  even 

3* 


'60  WHAT    WE    DO    NOT    ATTEMPT, 

preposterous  confidence,  to  overturn  all  the  science,  argu- 
ment, influence  of  the  modern  age,  and  so  to  vindicate 
the  supernaturalism  of  Christianity  ?  By  no  means.  We 
do  not  conceive  that  any  so  heavy  task  is  laid  upon  us. 
On  the  contrary,  we  regard  all  these  adverse  powers  as 
being,  in  another  view,  just  so  many  friendly  powers, 
every  one  of  which  has  some  contribution  to  make  for  the 
firmer  settlement  and  the  higher  completeness  of  the  Chris- 
tian faith.  They  are  not  in  pure  error,  but  there  is  a  dis- 
coverable and  valuable  truth  for  us,  maintained  by  every 
one,  if  only  it  were  adequately  conceived  and  set,  as  it  will 
be,  in  its  fit  place  and  connection.  Mr.  Hume's  argu- 
ment, for  example,  contains  a  great  and  sublime  truth; 
viz.,  that  nothing  ever  did  or  will  take  place  out  of  sys- 
tem, or  apart  from  law — not  even  miracles  themselves, 
which  must,  in  some  higher  view,  be  as  truly  under  law 
and  system  as  the  motions  even  of  the  stars.  Pantheism 
has  a  great  truth,  and  is  even  wanted,  as  a  balance  of  rec- 
tification to  the  common  error  that  places  God  afar  off, 
outside  of  his  works  or  above,  in  some  unimagined  alti- 
tude. No  doubt  there  is  a  truth  somewhere  in  spiritism 
which  will  yet  accrue  to  the  benefit  of  Christianity,  or,  at 
least,  to  an  important  rectification  of  our  conceptions  of 
man.  So  of  all  the  other  schools  and  modes  of  naturalism 
that  I  have  named.  I  have  no  jealousy  of  science,  or  any 
fear,  whether  of  its  facts  or  its  arguments.  For  God,  we 
may  be  certain,  is  in  no  real  disagreement  with  himself. 
It  is  only  a  matter  of  course  that,  until  the  great  account 
between  Christianity  and  science  is  liquidated,  there  should 
be  an  appearance  of  collision,  or  disagreement,  which  does 
not  really  exist.  As  little  do  we  propose  to  go  into  a  des- 
ultory battle  with  the  manifold  schemes  of  naturalism, 


AND    WHAT    WE    DO,  31 

above  described ;  still  less  to  undertake  a  reconciliation  of 
each  or  any  of  them  with  the  Christian  truth.  What  I 
propose  is  simply  this;  to  find  a  legitimate  place  for  the  super- 
natural in  Hie  system  of  Ood,  and  show  it  as  a  necessary  part 
of  the  divine  system  itself. 

If  I  am  successful,  I  shall  make  out  an  argument  for  the 
supernatural  in  Christianity  that  will  save  these  two  con- 
ditions:— First,  the  rigid  unity  of  the  system  of  God; 
secondly,  the  fact  that  every  thing  takes  place  under  fixed 
laws.  I  shall  make  out  a  conception  both  of  nature  and 
of  supernatural  redemption  by  Jesus  Christ,  the  incar- 
nate Word  of  God,  which  exactly  meets  the  magnificent 
outline-view  of  God's  universal  plan,  given  by  the  great 
apostle  to  the  Gentiles, — "And  He  is  before  all  things,  and 
by  Him  [in  Him,  it  should  be,]  all  things  consist."  Chris- 
tianity, in  other  words,  is  not  an  afterthought  of  God,  but 
a  forethought.  It  even  antedates  the  world  of  nature,  and 
is  "before  all  things," — "before  the  foundation  of  the 
world."  Instead  of  coming  into  the  world,  as  being  no 
part  of  the  system,  or  to  interrupt  and  violate  the  system 
of  things,  they  all  consist,  come  together  into  system,  in 
Christ,  as  the  center  of  unity  and  the  head  of  the  universal 
plan.  The  world  was  made  to  include  Christianity ;  under 
that  becomes  a  proper  and  complete  frame  of  order;  to 
that  crystalizes,  in  all  its  appointments,  events,  and  expe- 
riences ;  in  that  has  the  design  or  final  cause  revealed,  by 
which  all  its  distributions,  laws,  and  historic  changes  are 
determined  and  systematized.  All  which  is  beautifully 
and  even  sublimely  expressed  in  the  single  word  "con-sist" 
a  word  that  literally  signifies  standing  together;  as  when 
many  parts  coalesce  in  a  common  whole.  Hence  it  is  the 
more  to  be  regretted  that  the  translators,  in  the  rendering 


32  TO    FORTIFY 

"  by  him,"  instead  of  the  more  literal  and  exact  rendering 
11  in  him,"  have  so  far  confused  the  significance  and 
obscured  the  beauty  of  a  passage  that,  properly  translated, 
is  so  remarkable  for  the  transcendent,  philosophic  sub- 
limity of  its  import. 

The  same  truth  is  declared  more  circumstantially  and  as 
much  less  succinctly  in  the  gospel  of  John.  "All  things 
are  made  by  Him,  and  without  Him  [i.  e.,  apart  from  Him 
as  the  formal  cause  or  regulative  idea  of  the  plan,]  was 
not  any  thing  made  that  was  made."  Or  to  the  same 
effect, — "  He  was  in  the  world," — "  he  came  unto  his  own," 
affirming  that  he  was  here  before  he  came  as  the  son  of 
Mary;  and  that,  when  he  came,  he  came  not  as  an  intruder, 
defiant  of  all  previous  order  in  nature,  but  as  coming  unto 
"  his  own,"  to  fulfill  the  creative  idea  centered  in  his  per- 
son, and  to  complete  the  original  order  of  the  plan. 

Such  is  the  general  object  of  the  treatise  I  now  under- 
take ;  and,  if  I  am  able,  in  this  manner,  to  obtain  a  solid, 
intellectual  footing  for  the  supernatural,  evincing  not  only 
the  compatibility,  but  the  essentially  complementary  rela- 
tion of  nature  and  the  supernatural,  as  terms  included,  db 
origine,  in  the  unity  of  God's  plan,  or  system,  I  shall,  of 
course,  produce  a  conviction,  as  much  more  decided  and 
solid,  of  those  great  practical  truths,  which  belong  to  the 
supernatural  side  of  Christianity;  such  as  incarnation, 
regeneration,  justification  by  faith,  divine  guidance,  and 
prayer ; — truths  which  are  now  held  so  feebly,  and  in  a 
manner  so  timid  and  partial,  as  to  rob  them  of  their  genu- 
ine power.  Any  thing  which  displaces  the  present  jeal- 
ousy of  what  is  supernatural,  or  abolishes  the  timidity  of 
faith,  must,  as  we  may  readily  see,  be  an  important  contri- 


CHRISTIAN    EXPERIENCE,  33 

bution  to  Christian  experience  and  the  practical  life  of 
religion.  Nothing  do  we  need  so  deeply  as  a  new  inau- 
guration of  faith ;  or,  perhaps  I  should  rather  say,  a  rein- 
auguration  of  the  apostolic  faith,  and  the  spirit  which  dis- 
tinguished the  apostolic  age.  And  yet  a  reinauguration 
of  this  must,  in  some  very  important  sense,  be  a  new 
inauguration ;  for  it  can  be  accomplished  only  by  some 
victory  over  naturalism,  that  prepares  a  rational  founda- 
tion for  the  supernatural — such  as  was  not  wanted,  and 
was,  therefore,  impossible  to  be  prepared,  in  the  first  age 
of  the  church. 

It  is  scarcely  necessary  to  add  that,  while  I  am  looking 
with  interest  to  the  emboldening  of  faith  in  the  great 
truths  of  holy  experience,  I  have  a  particular  looking  in  my 
argument  toward  the  authentication  of  the  Christian  scrip- 
tures, in  a  way  that  avoids  the  inherent  difficulties  of  the 
question  of  a  punctually  infallible  and  verbal  inspiration. 
These  difficulties,  I  feel  constrained  to  admit,  are  insuper- 
able ;  for,  when  the  divine  authority  of  the  scriptures  is 
made  to  depend  thus  on  the  question  of  their  most  rigid, 
strictest,  most  punctual  infallibility,  they  are  made,  in  fact, 
to  stand  or  fall  by  mere  minima  and  not  by  any  thing 
principal  in  them,  or  their  inspiration.  And  then  what- 
ever smallest  doubt  can  be  raised,  at  any  most  trivial 
point,  suffices  to  imperil  every  thing,  and  the  main  ques- 
tion is  taken  at  the  greatest  possible  disadvantage.  The 
argument  so  stated  must  inevitably  be  lost ;  as,  in  fact,  it 
always  is.  For  it  has  even  to  be  given  up,  at  the  outset, 
by  concessions  that  leave  it  nothing  on  which  to  stand. 
For  no  sturdiest  advocate  of  a  verbal  and  punctual  inspir- 
ation can  refuse  to  admit  variations  of  copy,  and  the  prob- 
able or  possible  mistake  of  this  or  that  manuscript,  in  a 


34  TO    ESTABLISH 

transfer  of  names  and  numerals.  It  is  equally  difficult 
to  withhold  the  admission,  here  and  there,  of  a  possible 
interpolation,  or  that  words  have  crept  into  the  text 
that  were  once  in  the  margin.  Starting,  then,  with  a 
definition  of  infallibility,  fallibility  is  at  once  and  so  far 
admitted.  After  all,  the  words,  syllables,  iotas  of  the 
book  are  coming  into  question, — the  infallibility  is  logi- 
cally at  an  end  even  by  the  supposition.  The  moment 
we  begin  to  ask  what  manuscript  we  shall  follow?  what 
words  and  numerals  correct?  what  interpolations  extir- 
pate? we  have  possibly  a  large  work  on  hand,  and 
where  is  the  limit?  Shall  we  stop  short  of  giving  up 
1  John,  v.,  7,  or  shall  we  go  a  large  stride  beyond, 
and  give  up  the  first  chapters  of  Matthew  and  Luke? 
We  are  also  obliged  to  admit  that  the  canon  was  not 
made  by  men  infallibly  guided  by  the  Spirit;  and  then 
the  possibility  appears  to  logically  follow  that,  despite  of 
any  power  they  had  to  the  contrary,  some  book  may  have 
been  let  into  the  canon  which,  with  many  good  things, 
has  some  specks  of  error  in  it.  Besides,  if  the  question 
is  thrown  back  upon  us,  at  this  point,  we  are  obliged  to  ad- 
mit, and  do,  as  a  familiar  point  of  orthodoxy,  that  our  own 
polarities  are  disturbed,  our  judgment  discolored,  by  sin; 
so  that,  if  the  book  is  infallible,  the  sense  of  it  as  infallible 
is  not  and  can  not  be  in  us ;  how  then  can  we  amrm  it, 
or  maintain  it,  in  any  such  manner  of  strictness  and  exact 
perception?  We  could  not  even  sustain  the  infallibility 
of  God  in  this  manner ;  i.  e.  because  we  are  able  to  know  it, 
item  by  item,  as  comprehending  in  ourselves  a  complete 
sense  of  his  infallibility.  We  establish  God's  infallibility 
only  by  a  constructive  use  of  generals,  the  particulars  of 


THE    GOSPEL    HISTORY.  35 

which  are  conceived  by  us  only  in  the  faintest,  most  par- 
tial manner. 

Now  these  difficulties,  met  in  establishing  a  close  and 
punctual  infallibility,  are  rather  logical  than  real,  and 
originate,  not  in  any  defect  of  the  scriptures,  but  in  a  state- 
ment which  puts  us  in  a  condition  to  make  nothing  of  a 
good  cause, — a  condition  to  be  inevitably  worsted.  Indeed 
there  is  no  better  proof  of  a  divine  force  and  authority  in 
the  scriptures,  able  to  affirm  and  always  affirming  itself  in 
its  own  right,  even  to  the  end  of  the  world,  than  that  they 
continue  to  hold  their  ground  so  firmly,  when  the  speculat- 
ive issue  joined  in  their  behalf  has  been  so  badly  chosen  and, 
if  we  speak  of  what  is  true  logically,  so  uniformly  lost. 

I  see  no  way  to  gain  the  verdict  which,  in  fact,  they 
have  hitherto  gained  for  themselves,  but  to  change  our 
method  and  begin  at  another  point,  just  where  they 
themselves  begin ;  to  let  go  the  minima  and  lay  hold  of 
the  principals ; — those  great,  outstanding  verities,  in  which 
they  lay  their  foundations,  and  by  which  they  assert  them- 
selves. As  long  as  the  advocates  of  strict,  infallible 
inspiration  are  so  manifestly  tangled  and  lost  in  the  trivi- 
alities they  contend  for,  these  portentous  advances  of 
naturalism  will  continue.  And,  as  many  are  beginning 
already,  with  no  fictitious  concern,  to  imagine  that  Chris- 
tianity is  now  being  put  upon  its  last  trial, — whether  to 
stand  or  not  they  hardly  dare  be  confident, — why  should 
they  be  farther  discouraged  by  adhering  to  a  mode  of  trial 
which,  in  being  lost,  really  decides  nothing.  Let  the 
church  of  God,  and  all  the  friends  of  revelation,  as  a 
word  of  the  Lord  to  faith,  turn  their  thoughts  upon  an 
issue  more  intelligent  and  significant,  and  one  that  can  be 
certainly  sustained. 


CHAPTER  II. 

DEFINITIONS-NATURE  AND  THE  SUPERNATURAL. 

IN  order  to  the  intelligent  prosecution  of  our  subject, 
we  need,  first  of  all,  to  settle  on  the  true  import  of  cer- 
tain words  and  phrases,  by  the  undistinguishing  and  con- 
fused use  of  which,  more  than  by  any  other  cause,  the 
unbelieving  habit  of  our  time  has  been  silently  and  im- 
perceptibly determined.  They  are  such  as  these  : — "  na- 
ture," "the  system  of  nature,"  "the  laws  of  nature," 
"universal  nature,"  "the  supernatural,"  and  the  like. 
The  first  and  last  named,  "  nature"  and  the  "  supernatu- 
ral," most  need  our  attention;  for,  if  these  are  carefully 
distinguished,  the  others  will  scarcely  fail  to  yield  us  their 
true  meaning. 

The  Latin  etymology  of  the  word  nature,  presents  the 
true  force  of  the  term,  clear  of  all  ambiguity.  The  na- 
ture [natura]  °f  a  thing  is  the  future  participle  of  its 
being  or  becoming — its  about-to-be,  or  its  about-to-come-to- 
pass, — and  the  radical  idea  is,  that  there  is,  in  the  thing 
whose  nature  we  speak  of,  or  in  the  whole  of  things  called 
nature,  an  about-to-be,  a  definite  futuritio.n,  a  fixed  law  of 
coming  to  pass,  such  that,  given  the  thing,  or  whole  of 
things,  all  the  rest  will  follow  by  an  inherent  necessity. 
In  this  view,  nature,  sometimes  called  "universal  nature," 
and  sometimes  "the  system  of  nature,"  is  that  created 
realm  of  being  or  substance  which  has  an  acting,  a  going 
on  or  process  from  within  itself,  under  and  by  its  own 
laws.  Or,  if  we  say,  with  some,  that  the  laws  are  but  an- 
other name  for  the  immediate  actuating  power  of  God, 


NATUKE    DEFINED.  37 

still  it  makes  no  difference,  in  any  other  respect,  with  our 
conception  of  the  system.  It  is  yet  as  if  the  laws,  the  pow- 
ers, the  actings,  were  inherent  in  the  substances,  and  were 
by  them  determined.  It  is  still  to  our  scientific  separated 
from  our  religious  contemplation,  a  chain  of  causes  and 
effects,  or  a  scheme  of  orderly  succession,  determined  from 
within  the  scheme  itself. 

Having  settled,  thus,  our  conception  of  nature,  our  con- 
ception of  the  supernatural  corresponds.  That  is  super- 
natural, whatever  it  be,  that  is  either  not  in  the  chain  of 
natural  cause  and  effect,  or  which  acts  on  the  chain  of 
cause  and  effect,  in  nature,  from  without  the  chain.  Thus 
if  any  event  transpires  in  the  bosom,  or  upon  the  platform 
of  what  is  called  nature,  which  is  not  from  nature  itself,  or 
is  varied  from  the  process  nature  would  execute  by  her 
own  laws,  that  is  supernatural,  by  whatever  power  it  is 
wrought.  Suppose,  for  example,  (which  we  may,  for  illus- 
tration's sake,  even  though  it  can  not  be,)  that  there  were 
another  system  of  nature  incommunicably  separate  from 
ours,  some  "famous  continent  of  universe,"  like  that  on 
which  Bunyan  stumbled,  "  as  he  walked  through  many 
regions  and  countries ;"  if,  then,  this  other  universe  were 
swung  up  side  by  side  with  ours,  great  disturbance  would 
result,  and  the  disturbance  would  be,  to  us,  supernatural, 
because  from  without  our  system  of  nature ;  for,  though 
the  laws  of  our  system  are  acting,  still,  in  the  disturbance, 
they  are  not,  by  the  supposition,  acting  in  their  own  sys- 
tem, or  conditions,  but  by  an  action  that  is  varied  by  the 
forces  and  reciprocal  actings  of  the  other.  So  if  the  pro- 
cesses, combinations,  and  results  of  our  system  of  nature 
are  interrupted,  or  varied  by  the  action,  whether  of  God, 
or  angels,  or  men,  so  as  to  bring  to  pass  what  would  not 

4 


38  ALSO    THE    SUPERNATURAL. 

come  to  pass  in  it  by  its  own  internal  action,  under  the 
laws  of  mere  cause  and  effect,  the  variations  are,  in  like 
manner,  supernatural.  And  exactly  this  we  expect  to 
show :  viz.,  that  God  has,  in  fact,  erected  another  and  high- 
er system,  that  of  spiritual  being  and  government,  for 
which  nature  exists ;  a  system  not  under  the  law  of  cause 
and  effect,  but  ruled  and  marshaled  under  other  kinds  of 
laws  and  able  continually  to  act  upon,  or  vary  the  action  of 
the  processes  of  nature.  If,  accordingly,  we  speak  of  sys- 
tem, this  spiritual  realm  or  department  is  much  more  prop- 
erly called  a  system  than  the  natural,  because  it  is  closer  to 
God,  higher  in  its  consequence,  and  contains  in  itself  the 
ends,  or  final  causes,  for  which  the  other  exists  and  to  which 
the  other  is  made  to  be  subservient.  There  is,  however,  a 
constant  action  and  reaction  between  the  two,  and,  strictly 
speaking,  they  are  both  together,  taken  as  one,  the  true  sys- 
tem of  God  ;  for  a  system,  in  the  most  proper  and  philo- 
sophic sense  of  the  word,  is  a  complete  and  absolute  whole, 
which  can  not  be  taken  as  a  part  or  fraction  of  any  thing. 

We  do  not  mean,  of  course,  by  these  definitions,  or  dis- 
tinctions of  the  natural  and  supernatural,  to  assume  the 
impropriety  of  the  great  multitude  of  expressions,  in 
which  these  words  are  more  loosely  employed.  They  may 
well  enough  be  so  employed ;  the  convenience  of  speech 
requires  it ;  but  it  is  only  the  more  necessary,  on  that  ac- 
count, that  we  thoroughly  understand  ourselves  when  we 
use  them  in  this  manner. 

Thus  we  sometimes  speak  of  "  the  system  of  nature," 
using  the  word  nature  in  a  loose  and  general  way,  as  com- 
prising all  created  existence.  But  if  we  accommodate 
ourselves  in  this  manner,  it  behooves  us  to  see  that  we  do 
not,  in  using  such  a  term,  slide  into  a  false  philosophy 


LOOSER    USES,  39 

which  overturns  all  obligation,  by  assuming  the  real  uni- 
versality of  cause  and  effect,  and  the  subjection  of  human 
actions  to  that  law.  It  may  be  true  that  men  are  only 
things,  determinable  under  the  same  conditions  of  causality, 
but  it  will  be  soon  enough  to  assert  that  fact,  when  it  is 
ascertained  by  particular  inquiry;  which  inquiry  is  much 
more  likely  to  result  in  the  impression  that  the  phrase, 
"  system  of  nature,"  understood  in  this  manner  as  imply- 
ing that  human  actions  are  determined  by  mechanical  laws, 
is  much  as  if  one  were  to  speak  of  the  "  system  of  the 
school-house,"  as  supporting  the  inference  that  the  same 
kind  of  frame-work  that  holds  the  timbers  together,  is 
also  to  mortise  and  pin  fast  the  moral  order  of  the  school. 
In  the  same  manner,  we  sometimes  say  "universal  na- 
ture," when  we  only  catch  up  the  term  to  denote  the  whole 
creation  or  universe,  without  deciding  any  thing  in  regard 
to  the  possible  universality  of  nature  properly  defined. 
To  this,  again,  there  is  no  objection,  if  we  are  only  care- 
ful not  to  slide  into  the  opinion  that  natural  laws  and 
causes  comprehend  every  thing ;  as  multitudes  do,  without 
thought,  in  simply  yielding  to  the  force  of  such  a  term. 

The  word  "Nature"  again,  is  currently  used  in  our 
modern  literature  as  the  name  of  a  Universal  Power ;  be  it 
an  eternal  fate,  or  an  eternal  system  of  matter  reigning  by 
its  necessary  laws,  or  an  eternal  God  who  is  the  All,  and 
is,  in  fact,  nowise  different  from  a  system  of  matter.  Nature 
undergoes,  in  this  manner,  a  kind  of  literary  apotheosis,, 
and  receives  the  mock  honors  of  a  dilettanti  worship. 
And  the  new  nature-religion  is  the  more  valued,  be- 
cause both  the  god  and  the  worship,  being  creatures  of  the 
reigning  school  of  letters,  are  supposed  to  be  of  a  more 
superlative  and  less  common  quality.  But,  though  some- 


40  PERMISSIBLE    WITH    CAUTION. 

thing  is  here  said  of  religion,  with  a  religious  air,  the 
word  nature,  it  will  be  found,  is  used  in  exact  accordance 
still  with  its  rigid  and  proper  meaning,  as  denoting  that 
which  has  its  fixed  laws  of  coming  to  pass  within  itself. 
The  only  abuse  consists  in  the  assumed  universal  extent 
of  nature,  by  which  it  becomes  a  fate,  an  all-devouring 
abyss  of  necessity,  in  which  God,  and  man,  and  all  free 
beings  are  virtually  swallowed  up.  If  it  should  happen 
that  nature  proper  has  no  such  extent ;  but  is,  instead,  a 
comparatively  limited  and  meager  fraction  of  the  true  uni- 
verse, the  new  religion  would  appear  to  have  but  a  very 
shallow  foundation,  and  to  be,  in  fact,  a  fraud,  as  pitiful 
as  it  is  airy  and  pretentious. 

"We  also  speak  of  a  nature  in  free  beings,  and  count 
upon  it  as  a  motive,  cause,  or  ground  of  certainty,  in  re- 
spect of  their  actions.  Thus  we  assign  the  nature  of  God, 
and  the  nature  of  man,  as  reasons  of  choice  and  roots  of 
character,  representing  that  it  is  "the  nature  of  God"  to 
be  holy,  or  (it  may  be,)  "the  nature  of  man  to  do  wrong." 
Nor  is  there  any  objection  to  this  use  of  the  word  "  nature," 
taken  as  popular  language.  There  is,  doubtless,  in  God, 
as  a  free  intelligence,  a  constitution,  having  fixed  laws, 
answering  exactly  to  our  definition  of  nature.  That  there 
is  a  proper  and  true  nature  in  man  we  certainly  know ;  for 
all  the  laws  of  thought,  memory,  association,  feeling,  in 
the  human  soul  are  as  fixed  as  the  laws  of  the  heavenly 
bodies.  It  is  only  the  will  that  is  not  under  the  law  of 
cause  and  effect ;  and  the  other  functions  are,  by  their  laws, 
subordinated,  in  a  degree,  to  the  uses  of  the  will  and  its 
directing  sovereignty  over  their  changes  and  processes. 
And  yet  the  will,  calling  these  others  a  nature,  is  in  turn 
solicited  and  drawn  bv  them,  just  as  the  expressions  alluded 


LOOSER    USES    PERMISSIBLE.  41 

to  imply,  save  that  they  have,  in  fact,  no  causative  agency 
on  the  will  at  all.  They  are  the  will's  reasons,  that  in 
view  of  which  it  acts ;  so  that,  with  a  given  nature,  it  may 
be  expected,  with  a  certain  qualified  degree  of  confidence, 
to  act  thus  or  thus ;  but  they  are  never  causes  on  the  will, 
and  the  choices  of  the  will  are  never  their  effects.  There- 
fore, when  we  say  that  it  is  "the  nature  of  man  to  do 
this,"  the  language  is  to  be  understood  in  a  secondary, 
tropical  sense,  and  not  as  when  we  say  that  it  is  the  nature 
of  fire  to  burn  or  water  to  freeze. 

As  little  would  I  be  understood  to  insist  that  the  term 
supernatural  is  always  to  be  used  in  the  exact  sense  I  have 
given  it.  Had  the  word  been  commonly  used  in  this  close, 
sharply-defined  meaning,  much  of  our  present  unbelief,  or 
misbelief,  would  have  been  obviated ;  for  these  aberra- 
tions result  almost  universally  from  our  use  of  this  word 
in  a  manner  so  indefinite  and  so  little  intelligent.  Instead 
of  regarding  the  supernatural  as  that  which  acts  on  the 
chain  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature  from  without  the  chain, 
and  adhering  to  that  sense  of  the  term,  we  use  it,  very 
commonly,  in  a  kind  of  ghostly,  marveling  sense,  as  if 
relating  to  some  apparition,  or  visional  wonder,  or  it  may 
be  to  some  desultory,  unsystematizable  action,  whether  of 
angels  or  of  God.  Such  uses  of  the  word  are  permissible 
enough  by  dictionary  laws,  but  they  make  the  word  an 
offense  to  all  who  are  any  way  inclined  to  the  rationalizing 
habit.  On  the  other  hand,  there  are  many  who  claim  to 
be  acknowledged  as  adherents  of  a  supernatural  faith,  with 
as  little  definite  understanding.  Believing  in  a  God  supe- 
rior to  nature,  acting  from  behind  and  through  her  laws, 
they  suppose  that  they  are,  of  course,  to  be  classed  as  be- 
lievers in  a  supernatural  being  and  religion.  But  the 

4* 


42  DISTINCTION    SEEN, 

genuine  supernaturalism  of  Christianity  signifies  a  great 
deal  more  than  this ;  viz.,  that  God  is  acting  from  without 
on  the  lines  of  cause  and  effect  in  our  fallen  world  and 
our  disordered  humanity,  to  produce  what,  by  no  mere 
laws  of  nature,  will  ever  come  to  pass.  Christianity, 
therefore,  is  supernatural,  not  because  it  acts  through  the 
laws  of  nature,  limited  by,  and  doing  the  work  of,  the 
laws ;  but  because  it  acts  regeneratively  and  new-creative- 
ly  to  repair  the  damage  which  those  laws,  in  their  penal 
action,  would  otherwise  perpetuate.  Its  very  distinction, 
as  a  redemptive  agency,  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  enters  into 
nature,  in  this  regenerative  and  rigidly  supernatural  way, 
to  reverse  and  restore  the  lapsed  condition  of  sinners. 

But  the  real  import  of  our  distinction  between  nature 
and  the  supernatural,  however  accurately  stated  in  words, 
will  not  fully  appear,  till  we  show  it  in  the  concrete  ;  for 
it  does  not  yet  appear  that  there  is,  in  fact,  any  such  thing 
known  as  the  supernatural  agency  defined,  or  that  there 
are  in  esse  any  beings,  or  classes  of  beings,  who  are  distin- 
guished by  the  exercise  of  such  an  agency.  That  what  we 
have  defined  as  nature  truly  exists  will  not  be  doubted, 
but  that  there  is  any  being  or  power  in  the  universe,  who 
acts,  or  can  act  upon  the  chain  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature 
from  without  the  chain,  many  will  doubt  and  some  will 
strenuously  deny.  Indeed  the  great  difficulty  heretofore 
encountered,  in  establishing  the  faith  of  a  supernatural 
agency,  has  been  due  to  the  fact  that  we  have  made  a 
ghost  of  it ;  discussing  it  as  if  it  were  a  marvel  of  super- 
stition, and  no  definite  and  credible  reality.  Whereas,  it 
will  appear,  as  we  confront  our  difficulty  more  thought- 
fully and  take  its  full  force,  that  the  moment  we  begin  to 


IN    THE    WORLD    OF    FACT.  43 

conceive  ourselves  rightly,  we  become  ourselves  suptrnat- 
ural.  It  is  no  longer  necessary  to  go  hunting  after  mar- 
vels, apparitions,  suspensions  of  the  laws  of  nature,  to 
find  the  supernatural ;  it  meets  us  in  what  is  least  trans- 
cendent and  most  familiar,  even  in  ourselves.  In  our- 
selves we  discover  a  tier  of  existences  that  are  above  na- 
ture and,  in  all  their  most  ordinary  actions,  are  doing  their 
will  upon  it.  The  very  idea  of  our  personality  is  that  of 
a  being  not  under  the  law  of  cause  and  effect,  a  being  su- 
pernatural. This  one  point  clearly  apprehended,  all  the 
difficulties  of  our  subject  are  at  once  relieved,  if  not  abso- 
lutely and  completely  removed.  , 

If  any  one  is  startled  or  shocked  by  what  appears  to  be 
the  extravagance  of  this  position,  let  him  recur  to  our 
definition;  viz.,  that  nature  is  that  world  of  substance, 
whose  laws  are  laws  of  cause  and  effect,  and  whose  events 
transpire,  in  orderly  succession,  under  those  laws  ;  the  su- 
pernatural is  that  range  of  substance,  if  any  such  there 
be,  that  acts  upon  the  chain  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature 
from  without  the  chain,  producing,  thus,  results  that,  by 
mere  nature,  could  not  come  to  pass.  It  is  not  said,  be  it 
observed,  as  is  sometimes  done,  that  the  supernatural  im- 
plies a  suspension  of  the  laws  of  nature,  a  causing  them, 
for  the  time,  not  to  be — that,  perhaps,  is  never  done — it  is 
only  said  that  we,  as  powers,  not  in  the  line  of  cause  and 
effect,  can  set  the  causes  in  nature  at  work,  in  new  combi- 
nations otherwise  never  occurring,  and  produce,  by  our 
action  upon  nature,  results  which  she,  as  nature,  could 
never  produce  by  her  own  internal  acting. 

Illustrations  are  at  hand  without  number.  Thus,  na- 
ture, for  example,  never  made  a  pistol,  or  gunpowder,  or 
pulled  a  trigger ;  all  which  being  done,  or  procured  to  be 


44  SUPERNATURAL    ACTION 

done,  by  the  criminal,  in  his  act  of  murder,  he  is  hung  for 
what  is  rightly  called  his  unnatural  deed.  So  of  things 
not  criminal;  nature  never  built  a  house,  or  modeled  a 
ship,  or  fitted  a  coat,  or  invented  a  steam-engine,  or  wrote 
a  book,  or  framed  a  constitution.  These  are  all  events 
that  spring  out  of  human  liberty,  acting  in  and  upon  the 
realm  of  cause  and  effect,  to  produce  results  and  combina- 
tions, which  mere  cause  and  effect  could  not ;  and,  at  some 
point  of  the  process  in  each,  we  shall  be  found  coming 
down  upon  nature,  by  an  act  of  sovereignty  just  as  per- 
emptory and  mysterious  as  that  which  is  discovered  in  a 
miracle,  only  that  a  miracle  is  a  similar  coming  down  upon 
it  from  another  and  higher  being,  and  not  from  ourselves. 
Thus,  for  example,  in  the  firing  of  the  pistol,  we  find  ma- 
terials brought  together  and  compounded  for  making  an 
explosive  gas,  an  arrangement  prepared  to  strike  a  fire  into 
the  substance  compounded,  an  arm  pulled  back  to  strike 
the  fire,  muscles  contracted  to  pull  back  the  arm,  a  nerv- 
ous telegraph  running  down  from  the  brain,  by  which  some 
order  has  been  sent  to  contract  the  muscles;  and  then, 
having  come  to  the  end  of  the  chain  of  natural  causes,  the 
jury  ask,  who  sent  the  mandate  down  upon  the  nervous 
telegraph,  ordering  the  said  contraction?  And,  having 
found,  as  their  true  answer,  that  the  arraigned  criminal  did 
it,  they  offer  this  as  their  verdict,  and  on  the  strength  of 
the  verdict  he  is  hung.  He  had,  in  other  words,  a  power 
to  set  in  order  a  line  of  causes  and  effects,  existing  element- 
ally in  nature,  and  then,  by  a  sentence  of  his  will,  to  start 
the  line,  doing  his  unnatural  deed  of  murder.  If  it  be 
inquired  how  he  was  able  to  command  the  nervous  tele- 
graph in  this  manner,  we  can  not  tell,  any  more  than  we 
can  show  the  manner  of  a  miracle.  The  same  is  true  in 


FAMILIAR.  45 

regard  to  all  our  most  common  actions.  If  one  simply 
lifts  a  weight,  overcoming,  thus  far,  the  great  law  of  grav- 
ity, we  may  trace  the  act  mechanically  back  in  the  same 
way ;  and  if  we  do  it,  we  shall  come,  at  last,  to  the  man 
acting  in  his  personal  arbitrament,  and  shall  find  him  send- 
ing down  his  mandate  to  the  arm,  summoning  its  contrac- 
tions and  sentencing  the  weight  to  rise.  In  which,  as  we 
perceive,  he  has  just  so  muck  of  power  given  him  to  vary 
the  incidents  and  actings  of  nature  as  determined  by  her 
own  laws — so  much,  that  is,  of  power  supernatural. 

And  so  all  the  combinations  we  make  in  the  harnessing 
of  nature's  powers  imply,  in  the  last  degree,  thoughts, 
mandates  of  will,  that  are,  at  some  point,  peremptory  over 
the  motions  by  which  we  handle,  and  move,  and  shape, 
and  combine  the  substances  and  causes  of  the  world. 
And  to  what  extent  we  may  go  on  to  alter,  in  this  man- 
ner, the  composition  of  the  world,  few  persons  appear  to 
consider.  For  example,  it  is  not  absurd  to  imagine  the 
human  race,  at  some  future  time,  when  the  population 
and  the  works  of  industry  are  vastly  increased,  kindling 
so  many  fires,  by  putting  wood  and  coal  in  contact  with 
fire,  as  to  burn  up  or  fatally  vitiate  the  world's  atmosphere. 
That  the  condition  of  nature  will,  in  fact,  be  so  far  changed 
by  human  agency,  is  probably  not  to  be  feared.  We 
only  say  that  human  agency,  in  its  power  over  nature, 
holds,  or  may  well  enough  be  imagined  to  hold,  the  sover- 
eignty of  the  process.  Meantime,  it  is  even  probable,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  that  infections  and  pestilential  diseases 
invading,  every  now  and  then,  some  order  of  vegetable  or 
animal  life,  are  referable,  in  the  last  degree,  to  something 
done  upon  the  world  by  man.  For  indeed  we  shall  show, 
before  we  have  done,  that  the  scheme  of  nature  itself 


46  THE    WILL    IS    NOT 

is  a  scheme  unstrung  and  mistuned,  to  a  very  great  de- 
gree, by  man's  agency  in  it,  so  as  to  be  rather  unnature, 
after  all,  than  nature;  and,  for  just  that  reason,  demanding 
of  God,  even  for  system's  sake,  in  the  highest  range  of 
that  term,  miracle  and  redemption. 

Suffice  it,  for  the  present,  simply  to  clear,  as  well  as  we 
are  able,  this  main  point,  the  fact  of  a  properly  supernat- 
ural power  in  man.  Thus,  some  one,  going  back  to  the 
act  by  which  the  pistol  was  fired,  will  imagine,  after  all, 
that  the  murderer's  act  in  the  firing  was  itself  caused  in 
him  by  some  condition  back  of  what  we  call  his  choice,  as 
truly  as  the  explosion  of  the  powder  was  caused  by  the 
fire.  Then,  why  not  blame  the  powder,  we  answer,  as 
readily  as  the  man — which  most  juries  would  have  some 
difficulty  in  doing,  though  none  at  all  in  blaming  the 
man  ?  The  nature  of  the  objection  is  purely  imaginary, 
as,  in  fact,  the  common  sense,  if  we  should  not  rather  say 
the  common  consciousness  of  the  word  decides ;  for  we  are 
all  conscious  of  acting  from  ourselves,  uncaused  in  our  ac- 
tion. The  murderer  knows  within  himself  that  he  did  the 
deed,  and  that  nothing  else  did  it  through  him.  So  his 
consciousness  testifies — so  the  consciousness  of  every  man 
revising  his  actions — and  no  real  philosopher  will  ever 
undertake  to  substitute  the  verdict  of  consciousness,  by 
another,  which  he  has  arrived  at  only  by  speculation,  or  a 
logical  practice  in  words.  The  sentence  of  consciousness 
is  final. 

Hence  the  absurd  and  really  blamable  ingenuity  of  those 
would-be  philosophers  who,  not  content  with  the  clear, 
indisputable  report  of  consciousness  in  such  a  case,  go  on 
to  ask  whether  the  wrong-doer  of  any  kind  was  not  act- 
ing, in  his  wrong,  under  motives  and  determined  by 


A    SCALE-BEAM.  47 

the  strongest  motives,  and,  since  he  is  a  being  made  to 
act  in  this  manner,  whether,  after  all,  he  really  acted 
himself,  any  more  than  other  natural  substances  do 
when  they  yield  to  the  strongest  cause  ?  Doubtless  he 
acted  under  motives,  and  probably  enough  he  felt 
beside  that  half  his  crime  was  in  his  motive,  being  that 
which  his  own  bad  heart  supplied.  The  matter  of  the 
strongest  motive  is  more  doubtful ;  but,  if  it  be  true,  in 
every  case,  that  the  wrong-doer  chooses  what  to  him  is  the 
strongest  motive,  it  by  no  means  follows  that  he  acts  in  the 
way  of  a  scale-beam,  swayed  by  the  heaviest  weight; 
for  the  strength  of  the  motive  may  consciously  be  derived, 
in  great  part,  from  what  his  own  perversity  puts  into  it; 
and,  what  is  more,  he  may  be  as  fully  conscious  that  he 
acts,  in  every  case,  from  himself,  in  pure  self-determina- 
tion, as  he  would  be  if  he  acted  for  no  motive  at  all.  Con- 
sciously he  is  not  a  scale-beam,  or  any  passive  thing,  but  a 
self-determining  agent;  and  if  he  looks  out  always  for  the 
strongest  motive,  he  still  as  truly  acts  from  his  own  person- 
al arbitrament  as  if  he  were  always  pursuing  the  weakest. 
It  does  not,  however,  appear,  from  any  evidence  we  can 
discover,  that  human  action  is  determined  uniformly  by 
the  strongest  motive.  That  is  the  doctrine  of  Edwards,  in 
his  famous  treatise  on  the  will,*  but  as  far  as  there  is  any 

*  The  fortunes  of  this  Treatise,  in  the  world  of  morals  and  religion,  have 
been  quite  as  remarkable  as  the  puzzle  it  has  raised  in  the  world  of  letters. 
The  immediate  object  of  the  writer  was  gained,  and  the  faith  of  God's  eternal 
government,  assailed  by  a  crazy  scheme  of  liberty  which  brought  in  open 
question  the  divine  foreknowledge  and  the  proper  self-understanding  of 
God  in  his  plan,  was  effectually  vindicated.  So  far  the  argument  availed  to 
serve  the  genuine  purposes  of  religion.  But,  from  that  day  to  this,  passing 
over  to  the  side  opposite,  it  has  been  turned  more  and  more  disastrously 
against  tlie  Christian  truth,  and  even  against  the  first  principles  of  moral 


48  STOT    DETEKMINED    BY 

appearance  of  force  in  his  argument,  it  consists  in  the 
inference  drawn,  or  judgment  passed,  after  any  act  of 
choice,  that  the  inducing  motive  must  have  been  the 
strongest  because  it  prevailed.  Whereas,  appealing  to  his 
simple  consciousness,  he  would  have  found  that  he  had 
never  a  thought  of  the  superior  strength  of  the  motive 
chosen,  before  the  choice;  and  that,  when  he  ascertained  the 
fact  of  its  superiority,  it  was  only  by  an  inference  or  specu- 
lative judgment  drawn  from  the  choice — just  as  some 
harvester,  noting  the  heavy  perspiration  that  drenches  his 
body  in  the  field,  will  judge  from  such  a  sign  that  he  must 
be  dissolving  with  heat ;  when  the  real  sense  of  his  body, 
wiser  and  truer  than  his  logic,  is  that  he  is  being  cooled. 
And  what,  moreover,  if  it  should  happen  that  Edwards, 
in  his  inference,  is  only  carrying  over  into  the  world  of 
mind  a  judgment  formed  in  the  world  of  matter;  subjecting 
human  souls  to  the  analogy  of  scale-beams,  and  conclud- 
ing that,  since  nature  yields  to  the  strongest  force,  the 
supernatural  must  do  the  same.  Meantime,  what  is  the 
consciousness  testifying?  Here  is  the  whole  question. 
There  is  no  place  here  for  a  volume,  or  even  for  the 

obligation.  Priestly  was  an  implicit  believer  in  the  doctrine,  holding  it  as  the 
foundation  principle  of  a  scheme  of  necessity  which  could  hardly  be  said  to 
leave  a  real  place  for  duty  in  the  world.  And  now,  in  our  own  day,  it  has 
descended  to  the  level  of  the  subterranean  infidelity,  and  become  a  familiar 
and  standing  argument  with  almost  every  moral  outcast,  who  has  thought 
enough  in  him  to  know  that  he  is  annoyed  by  the  distinctions  of  virtue. 
Having  turned  philosopher  on  just  this  point  and  shown  that  wo  are  all  gov- 
erned by  the  strongest  motive,  he  asks,  with  an  air  of  triumph,  where,  then, 
is  the  place  for  blame  ?  What  do  we  all  but  just  what  we  are  made  to  do  ? 
Could  Edwards  return  to  look  on  the  uses  now  made  of  his  argument,  his 
saintly  spirit  might  possibly  be  stirred  with  some  doubts  of  its  validity. 

Compare  the  able  statement  of  this  subject  by  Harris. — (Primev 
100  Sec.  VI. 


THE    STRONGEST    MOTIVE.  49 

amount  of  a  syllogism.  Find  what  the  consciousness  test- 
ifies and  that,  all  tricks  of  argument  apart,  is  the  truth. 
Taking,  then,  this  simple  issue,  the  verdict  we  are  quite 
sure  is  against  the  doctrine  of  Edwards ;  viz.,  that,  in  all 
wrong,  or  blamable  action,  we  consciously  take  the  weakest 
motive  and  most  worthless ;  and,  partly  for  that  reason,, 
blame  our  own  folly  and  perversity.  It  may  be  that  the 
good  rejected  stands  superior  only  before  our  rational  con- 
victions, while  the  enticement  followed  stirs  more  actively 
our  lusts  and  passions.  Still  we  know,  and  believe,  and 
deeply  feel,  at  the  time, — we  even  shudder  it  may  be  in  the 
choice,  at  the  sense  of  our  own  perversity — that  we  are 
choosing  the  worst  and  meanest  thing,  casting  away  the 
gold  and  grasping  after  the  dirt.  Probably  a  good  many 
crude-minded  persons,  little  capable  of  reporting  the  true 
verdict  of  their  consciousness,  would  answer  immediately, 
after  any  such  act  of  choice,  that  they  made  it  because  the 
motive  was  strongest ;  for  every  most  vulgar  mind  is  so 
far  under  the  great  law  of  dynamics  as  to  judge  that 
whatever  force  prevails  must  be  the  strongest.  Besides, 
how  could  he  be  a  reasonable  being  if  he  chose  the  weak- 
est motive  ;  therefore  it  must  be  that  he  chose  the  strongest. 
So  it  stands,  not  as  any  report  of  consciousness,  but  simply 
as  a  must  be  of  the  logical  understanding.  Whereas,  the 
real  sin  of  the  choice  was  exactly  this  and  nothing  else, 
that  the  wrong-doer  followed  after  the  weakest  and  worst, 
and  did  not  act  as  a  reasonable  being  should;  and  that  is 
what  his  consciousness,  if  he  could  get  far  back  enough 
into  the  sense  of  the  moment,  would  report.  Nor  does 
it  vary  at  all  the  conclusion  that  a  wrong-doer  chooses 
the  weakest  motive,  to  imagine,  with  many  loose-minded 
teachers,  that  the  right  is  only  postponed,  and  the  wrong 

5 


50  THE    WILL    NOT    UNDER 

chosen  for  the  moment,  with  a  view  to  secure  the  double 
benefit,  both  of  the  right  and  the  wrong ;  for  the  real  ques- 
tion, at  the  time,  is,  in  every  such  case,  whether  it  is  wisest, 
best,  and  every  way  most  advantageous,  to  make  the 
delay  and  try  for  the  double  benefit ;  and  no  man  ever  yet 
believed  that  it  was.  Never  was  there  a  case  of  wrong 
or  sinful  choice,  in  which  the  agent  believed  that  he  was 
really  choosing  the  strongest,  or  weightiest  and  most  valu- 
able motive.* 

So  far,  then,  is  man  from  being  any  proper  item  of 

*  A  certain  class  of  theologians  may,  perhaps,  imagine  that  such  a  view 
of  choice  takes  away  the  ground  of  the  Divine  foreknowledge.  How  can 
God  foreknow  what  choices  men  may  form,  when,  for  aught  that  ap- 
pears, they  as  often  choose  against  the  strongest  motive  as  with  it? 
He  could  not  foreknow  any  thing,  we  answer,  under  such  conditions,  if  he 
were  obliged  to  find  out  future  things,  as  the  astronomers  make  out  almanacs, 
by  computation.  But  he  is  a  being,  not  who  computes,  but  who,  by  the 
eternal  necessity  even  of  his  nature,  intuits  every  thing.  His  foreknowledge 
does  not  depend  on  his  will,  or  the  adjustment  of  motives  to  make  us  will 
thus  or  thus,  but  he  foreknows  every  thing  first  conditionally,  in  the  world 
of  possibility,  before  he  creates,  or  determines  any  thing  to  be,  in  the  world 
of  fact.  Otherwise,  all  his  purposes  would  be  grounded  in  ignorance,  not  in 
wisdom,  and  his  knowledge  would  consist  in  following  after  his  will,  to  learn 
what  his  will  has  blindly  determined.  This  is  not  the  scripture  doctrine, 
which  grounds  all  the  purposes  of  God  in  his  wisdom ;  that  is,  in  what  he  per- 
ceives by  his  eternal  intuitive  foreknowledge  of  what  is  contained  in  all  possi- 
ble systems  and  combinations  before  creation — "whom  he  did  foreknow,  them 
he  also  did  predestinate  " — "  elect,  according  to  the  foreknowledge  of  God." 
If,  then,  God  foreknows,  or  intuitively  knows,  all  that  is  in  the  possible  sys- 
tem and  the  possible  man,  without  calculation,  he  can  have  little  difficulty, 
after  that,  in  foreknowing  the  actual  man,  who  is  nothing  but  the  possible 
in  the  world  of  possibles,  set  on  foot  and  become  actual  in  the  world  of  ac- 
tuals. So  far,  therefore,  as  the  doctrine  of  Edwards  was  contrived  to  sup- 
port the  certainty  of  God's  foreknowledge,  and  lay  a  basis  for  the  systematic 
government  of  the  world  and  the  universal  sovereignty  of  God's  purposes, 
it  appears  to  be  quite  unnecessary. 


CAUSE    AND    EFFECT.  51 

nature.  He  is  under  no  law  of  cause  and  effect  in  his 
choices.  He  stands  out  clear  and  sovereign  as  a  being 
supernatural,  and  his  definition  is  that  he  is  an  original 
power,  acting,  not  in  the  line  of  causality,  but  from  him- 
self. He  is  not  independent  of  nature  in  the  sense  of 
being  separated  from  it  in  his  action,  but  he  is  in  it,  envi- 
roned by  it,  acting  through  it,  partially  sovereign  over  it, 
always  sovereign  as  regards  his  self-determination,  and 
only  not  completely  sovereign  as  regards  executing  all 
that  he  wills  in  it.  In  certain  parts  or  departments  of  the 
soul  itself,  such  as  memory,  appetite,  passion,  attention, 
imagination,  association,  disposition,  the  will-power  in  him 
is  held  in  contact,  so  to  speak,  with  conditions  and  quali- 
ties that  are  dominated  partly  by  laws  of  cause  and  effect ; 
for  these  faculties  are  partly  governed  by  their  own  laws, 
and  partly  submitted  to  his  governing  will  by  their  own 
laws ;  so  that  when  he  will  exercise  any  control  over  them, 
or  turn  them  about  to  serve  his  purpose,  he  can  do  it,  in  a 
qualified  sense  and  degree,  by  operating  through  their 
laws.  As  far  as  they  are  concerned,  he  is  pure  nature, 
and  he  is  only  a  power  superior  to  cause  and  effect  at  the 
particular  point  of  volition  where  his  liberty  culminates, 
and  where  the  administration  he  is  to  maintain  over  his 
whole  nature  centers. 

It  is  also  a  part  of  the  same  general  view  that,  as  all 
functions  of  the  soul  but  the  will  are  a  nature,  and  are 
only  qualifiedly  subjected  to  the  will  by  their  laws,  the  will, 
without  ever  being  restricted  in  its  self-determination,  will 
often  be  restricted,  as  regards  executive  force  to  perform 
what  it  wills.  In  this  matter  of  executive  force  or  capaci- 
ty, we  are  under  physiological  and  cerebral  limitations; 
limitations  of  association,  want,  condition ;  limitations  of 


52  EXECUTIVE    FORCE 

miseducated  thought,  perverted  sensibility,  prejudice,  su- 
perstition, a  second  nature  of  evil  habit  and  passion;  by 
which,  plainly  enough,  our  capacity  of  doing  or  becoming 
is  greatly  reduced.  This,  in  fact,  is  the  grand,  all-condi- 
tioning truth  of  Christianity  itself;  viz.,  that  man  has  no 
ability,  in  himself  and  by  merely  acting  in  himself,  to 
become  right  and  perfect ;  and  that,  hence,  without  some 
extension  to  him  from  without  and  above,  some  approach 
and  ministration  that  is  supernatural,  he  can  never  become 
what  his  own  ideals  require.  And  therefore  it  is  the  more 
remarkable  that  so  many  are  ready,  in  all  ages,  to  take  up 
the  notion,  and  are  even  doing  it  now,  as  a  fresh  discovery, 
that  these  stringent  limitations  on  our  capacity  take  away 
the  liberty  of  our  will.  As  if  the  question  of  executive 
force,  the  ability  to  make  or  become,  had  any  thing  to  do 
with  our  self-determining  liberty!  At  the  point  of  the 
will  itself  we  may  still  be  as  free,  as  truly  original  and 
self-active,  as  if  we  could  do  or  execute  all  that  we  would ; 
otherwise,  freedom  would  be  impossible,  except  on  the 
condition  of  being  omnipotent ;  and  even  then,  as  in  due 
time  we  shall  see,  would  be  environed  by  many  insuper- 
able necessities.  As  long  ago  as  when  Paul  found  it  pres- 
ent with  him  to  will,  but  could  not  find  how  to  perform, 
this  distinction  between  volitional  self-determination  and  ex- 
ecutive capacity  began  to  "be  recognized,  and  has  been  re- 
cognized and  stated,  in  every  subsequent  age,  till  now.  No 
one  is  held,  even  for  a  moment,  to  a  bad  and  wrong  self- 
determination,  simply  because  he  has  not  the  executive 
force  to  will  himself  into  an  angel,  or  because  he  can  not 
become,  unhelped,  and  at  once,  all  that  he  would.  He  is 
therefore  still  a  fair  subject  of  blame ;  partly  because  he 
has  narrowed  his  capacities,  or  possibilities,  of  doing  or  be- 


UNDER    LIMITATIONS.  53 

coming,  by  his  former  sin,  and  partly  because  he  consci- 
ously does  not  will  the  right  and  struggle  after  God  now; 
which  he  is  under  perfect  obligation  to  do,  because  the  terms 
of  duty  are  absolute  or  unconditional ;  and,  if  possible,  still 
more  perfect  because  he  has  helps  of  grace  and  favor  put 
in  his  reach,  to  be  laid  hold  of,  which,  if  he  accepts  them, 
will  infallibly  medicate  the  disabilities  he  is  under. 

That  mankind,  as  being  under  sin,  are  under  limitations 
of  executive  ability,  unable  to  do  and  become  all  that  is  re 
quired  of  them  by  their  highest  ideals  of  thought,  is  then 
no  new  doctrine.  Christianity  is  based  in  the  fact  of  such  a 
disability,  and  affirms  it  constantly  as  a  fact  that  creates  no 
infringement  of  responsibility  and  personal  liberty  at  all, 
as  regards  the  particular  sphere  of  the  will  itself.  And 
therefore  it  will  not  be  expected  of  any  Christian  that  he 
will  be  greatly  impressed  by  what  are  sometimes  offered 
now  as  original  and  peremptory  decisions  against  human 
liberty,  grounded  in  the  fact  that  man  is  not  omnipotent — 
not  able  to  do  or  become,  what  he  is  able  to  think. 
Thus  we  have  the  following,  offered  as  a  final  disposal  of 
the  question  of  liberty,  by  a  very  brilliant,  entertaining, 
and  often  very  acute  writer: — "Do  you  want  an  image  of 
the  human  will,  or  the  self-determining  principle,  as  com- 
pared with  its  prearranged  and  impossible  restrictions? 
A  drop  of  water  imprisoned  in  a  crystal ;  you  may  see 
such  a  one  in  any  mineralogical  collection.  One  little  par- 
ticle in  the  crystalline  prism  of  the  solid  universe.  *  * 
The  chief  planes  of  its  inclosing  solid  are  of  course  organ- 
ization, education,  condition.  Organization  may  reduce 
the  will  to  nothing,  as  in  some  idiots;  and,  from  this 
zero,  the  scale  mounts  upward,  by  slight  gradations. 
Education  is  only  second  to  nature.  Imagine  all  the 


54  SELF-DETERMINATION    STILL 

infants  born  this  year  in  Boston  and  Timbuctoo  to  change 
places  I  Condition  does  less,  but  "  Give  me  neither  pov- 
erty nor  riches"  was  the  prayer  of  Agur,  and  with  good 
reason.  If  there  is  any  improvement  in  modern  theology, 
it  is  in  getting  out  of  the  region  of  pure  abstractions,  and 
taking  these  every-day  forces  into  account."  * 

It  may  have  been  a  fault  of  the  former  times  that,  in 
judgments  of  human  character  and  conduct,  no  sufficient 
allowance  was  made  for  these  "every-day  forces"  and 
others  which  might  be  named ;  if  so,  let  the  mistake  be 
corrected ;  but  to  imagine  that  the  freedom,  or  self-deter- 
mining liberty  of  the  human  will  is  to  be  settled  by  any 
such  external  references,  even  starts  the  suspicion  that  the 
idea  itself  of  the  will  has  not  yet  arrived.  So  when  the 
doctrine  is  located  as  being  a  something  in  "the  region  of 
pure  abstractions,"  because  it  is  not  found  by  some  scalpel 
inspection,  or  out-door  hunt  in  the  social  conditions  of  life. 
What  can  be  further  off  from  all  abstractions  than  the  im- 
mediate, living,  central,  all-dominating  consciousness  of  our 
own  self-activity?  Is  consciousness  an  abstraction?  Is 
any  thing  further  off  from  abstractions,  or  more  impossible 
to  be  classed  with  them  ?  On  the  contrary,  the  very  con- 
ceit here  allowed,  that  a  great  question  of  consciousness 
may  be  settled  by  external  processes  of  deduction,  and  by 
generalizations  that  do  not  once  touch  the  fact,  is  only  an 
attempt  to  make  an  abstraction  of  it.  And  yet,  after  it  is 
done  and  seems  to  be  finally  disposed  of  in  that  manner, 
after  the  discovery  is  fully  made  out  that  our  self-determin- 
ing will  is  only  "a  drop  of  water  imprisoned  in  a  crystal, 
one  little  particle  in  the  crystalline  prism  of  the  solid 
universe,"  who  is  there,  not  excepting  the  just  now  very 
*  Atlantic  Monthly,  Feb.,  1858,  p.  464. 


A    FACT    OF    CONSCIOUSNESS.  55 

much  humbled  discoverer  himself,  who  does  not  know, 
every  day  of  his  life,  and  does  not  show,  a  thousand  times 
a  day,  that  he  has  the  sense  in  him  of  something  different? 
Even  if  he  does  no  more  than  humorously  dub  himself 
Autocrat  of  the  Breakfast  Table,  it  will  be  sufficiently  plain 
that  his  autocracy  is  a  much  more  considerable  figure  with 
him  than  a  drop  of  water  in  a  crystal.  He  most  evidently 
imagines  some  presiding  and  determining  mind  at  the 
Table,  that  is  much  more  of  a  reality  and  much  less  of  an 
abstraction. 

And  so  it  will  be  found  universally  that,  however 
strongly  drawn  the  supposed  disadvantages  and  hin- 
drances to  virtue  may  be,  there  is,  in  every  mind,  a  large 
and  positive  consciousness  of  being  master  of  its  own 
choices  and  responsible  for  them.  A  translation  from 
Boston  to  Timbuctoo  will  not  anywise  alter  the  fact. 
There  was  never  a  man,  however  miseducated,  or  sup- 
pressed by  his  necessities,  or  corrupted  by  bad  associations, 
or  misled  by  base  examples,  who  had  not  still  his  moral 
convictions,  and  did  not  blame  himself  in  wrongs  commit- 
ted. So  firm,  and  full,  and  indestructible  is  this  inborn, 
moral  autocracy  of  the  soul,  that,  as  certainly  in  Timbuc- 
too as  in  Boston,  it  takes  upon  itself  the  sentence  of  wrong, 
and  no  matter  what  inducements  there  may  have  been,  no 
matter  how  brutalized  the  practices  in  which  it  had  been 
trained,  recognizes  still  the  sovereignty  of  right,  and 
blames  itself  in  every  known  deviation  from  it.  His 
judgment  of  what  particular  things  are  necessary  to  fulfill 
the  great  idea  of  right  may  be  coarse,  and,  as  we  should 
say,  mistaken ;  but  he  acknowledges,  in  the  deepest  con- 
victions of  his  nature,  that  nothing  done  against  the 
eternal,  necessary  law  of  right  can  be  justified.  The  fact 


56  HENCE    ALL    GREATNESS 

that  his  wild  nature  is  so  nearly  untamable  to  right,  or 
that  being  or  becoming  the  perfect  good  he  thinks,  is  so 
far  off  from  his  capacity,  so  nearly  impossible  under  his 
executive  limitations,  is  really  nothing.  Still  he  must, 
and  does,  condemn  the  bad  liberty  allowed  in  every 
conscious  wrong. 

Self-determination,  therefore,  as  respects  the  mere  will 
as  a  power  of  volition,  is  essentially  indestructible.  And 
it  is  this  gift  of  power,  this  originative  liberty,  consti- 
tuting, as  it  does,  the  central  attribute  of  all  personality, 
that  gives  us  impressions  of  what  is  personal  in  character, 
so  different  from  those  which  we  derive  from  any  thing 
natural.  Hence,  for  example,  it  is  that  we  look  on  the 
nobler  demonstrations  of  character  in  man,  with  a  feeling 
so  different  from  any  that  can  be  connected  with  mere 
cause  and  effect.  In  every  friend  we  distinguish  some- 
thing more  than  a  distillation  of  natural  causes ;  a  free, 
faithful  soul,  that,  having  a  power  to  betray,  stays  fast  in 
the  integrity  of  love  and  sacrifice.  We  rejoice  in  heroic 
souls,  and  in  every  hero  we  discover  a  majestic  spirit,  how 
far  transcending  the  merely  instinctive  and  necessary 
actings  of  animal  and  vegetable  life.  He  stands  out  in 
the  flood  of  the  world's  causes,  strong  in  his  resolve,  not 
knowing,  in  a  just  fight,  how  to  yield,  but  protesting, 
with  Coriolanus, — 

Let  the  Volsces 

Plow  Rome  and  harrow  Italy,  I'll  never 
Be  such  a  gosling  as  to  obey  instinct,  but  stand, 
As  if  a  man  was  author  of  himself, 
And  knew  no  other  kin. 

Hence  the  honor  we  so  profusely  yield  to  the  martyrs, 
who  are  God's  heroes ;  able,  as  in  freedom,  to  yield  their 


IN    CHARACTER.  67 

flesh  up  in  the  fires  of  testimony,  and  sing  themselves 
away  in  the  smoke  of  their  consuming  bodies.  Were 
they  a  part  only  of  nature,  and  held  to  this  by  the  law 
of  cause  and  effect  in  nature,  we  should  have  as  much 
reason  to  honor  their  Christian  fortitude,  as  we  have  to 
honor  the  combustion  of  a  fire ;  even  that  which  kindled 
their  faggots : — as  much  and  not  more. 

Such  is  the  sense  we  have  of  all  great  character  in  men. 
We  look  upon  them,  not  as  wheels  that  are  turned  by 
natural  causes,  yielding  their  natural  effects,  as  the  flour 
is  yielded  by  a  mill,  but  what  we  call  their  character  is 
the  majestic  proprium  of  their  personality,  that  which 
they  yield  as  the  fruit  of  their  glorious  self-hood  and  im- 
mortal liberty.  What,  otherwise,  can  those  triumphal 
arches  mean,  arranged  for  the  father  of  his  country,  now 
on  his  way  to  be  inaugurated  as  its  First  Magistrate? 
what  those  processions  of  women,  strewing  the  way  with 
flowers?  what  the  thundering  shouts  of  men,  seconding 
their  voices  by  the  boom  of  cannon  posted  on  every  hill? 
Why  this  thrill  of  emotion  just  now  running  electrically 
through  so  many  millions  of  hearts  toward  this  single 
man?  It  is  the  reverence  they  feel,  and  can  not  fitly  ex- 
press, to  personal  greatness  and  heroic  merit  in  a  great 
cause.  Were  our  Washington  conceived  in  that  cause  of 
good  and  great  action,  by  which  he  became  the  deliverer 
of  his  country,  to  be  the  mere  distillation  of  natural  causes, 
who  of  us  would  allow  himself  to  be  thrilled  with  any  such 
sentiments  of  reverence  and  personal  homage?  It  is  no 
mere  wheel,  no  link  in  a  chain,  that  stirs  our  blood  in  this 
manner;  but  it  is  a  man,  the  sense  we  have  of  a  man,  rising 
out  of  the  level  of  things,  great  above  all  things,  great  as  be- 
ing himself.  Here  it  is,  in  demonstrations  like  these,  that 


58  WE    OURSELVES,    THEN 

we  meet  the  spontaneous  verdict  of  mankind,  apart  from  all 
theories,  and  quibbles,  and  sophistries  of  argument,  testify-' 
ing  that  man  is  a  creature  out  of  mere  nature — a  free  cause 
in  himself — great,  therefore,  in  the  majesty  of  great  virtues 
and  heroic  acts. 

The  same  is  true,  as  we  may  safely  assume,  in  regard 
to  all  the  other  orders  and  realms  of  spiritual  existence ; 
to  angels  good  and  bad,  seraphim,  principalities,  and 
powers  in  heavenly  places.  They  are  all  supernatural, 
and  it  is  in  them,  as  belonging  to  this  higher  class  of  ex- 
istences, that  God  beholds  the  final  causes,  the  uses,  and 
the  grand  systematizing  ideas  of  his  universal  plan.  Na- 
ture, as  comprehending  the  domain  of  cause  and  effect,  is 
only  the  platform  on  which  he  establishes  his  kingdom  as 
a  kingdom  of  minds,  or  persons,  every  one  of  whom  has 
power  to  act  upon  it,  and,  to  some  extent,  greater  or  less, 
to  be  sovereign  over  it.  So  that,  after  all  which  has  been 
done  by  the  sensuous  littleness,  the  shallow  pride,  and 
the  idolatry  of  science,  to  make  a  total  universe,  or  even  a 
God,  of  nature,  still  it  is  nothing  but  the  carpet  on  which 
we  children  have  our  play,  and  which  we  may  only  use 
according  to  its  design,  or  may  cut,  and  burn,  and  tear  at 
will.  The  true  system  of  God  centers  still  in  us,  and  not 
in  it;  in  our  management,  our  final  glory  and  completeness 
of  being  as  persons,  not  in  the  set  figures  of  the  carpet 
we  so  eagerly  admire  and  call  it  science  to  ravel. 

Finding,  now,  in  this  manner,  that  we  ourselves  are 
supernatural  creatures,  and  that  the  supernatural,  instead 
of  being  some  distant,  ghostly  affair,  is  familiar  to  us  as 
our  own  most  familiar  action ;  also,  that  nature,  as  a  realm 
of  cause  and  effect,  is  made  to  be  acted  on  from  without 


ABE    SUPERNATURAL    AGENTS.  59 

by  us  and  all  moral  beings — thus  to  be  the  environment  of 
our  life,  the  instrument  of  our  activity,  the  medium  of 
our  right  or  wrong  doing  toward  each  other,  and  so  the 
school  of  our  trial — a  further  question  rises ;  viz.,  what 
shall  we  think  of  God's  relations  to  nature  ?  If  it  be 
nothing  incredible  that  we  should  act  on  the  chain  of 
cause  and  effect  in  nature,  is  it  more  incredible  that  God 
should  thus  act?  Strange  as  it  may  seem,  this  is  the 
grand  offense  of  supernaturalism,  the  supposing  that  God 
can  act  on  nature  from  without ;  on  the  chain  of  cause  and 
effect  in  nature  from  without  the  chain  of  connection,  by 
which  natural  consequences  are  propagated — exactly  that 
which  we  ourselves  are  doing  as  the  most  familiar  thing  in 
our  lives  1  It  involves,  too^  as  we  can  see  at  a  glance,  and 
shall  hereafter  show  more  fully,  no  disruption,  by  us,  of 
the  laws  of  nature,  but  only  a  new  combination  of  its 
elements  and  forces,  and  need  not  any  more  involve  such 
a  disruption  by  Him.  Nor  can  any  one  show  that  a  mira- 
cle of  Christ,  the  raising,  for  example,  of  Lazarus,  in- 
volves any  thing  more  than  that  nature  is  prepared  to  be 
acted  on  by  a  divine  power,  just  as  it  is  to  be  acted  on  by 
a  human,  in  the  making  of  gunpowder,  or  the  making  and 
charging  of  a  fire-arm.  For,  though  there  seems  to  be  an 
immense  difference  in  the  grade  of  the  results  accom- 
plished, it  is  only  a  difference  which  ought  to  appear,  re- 
garding the  grade  of  the  two  agents  by  whom  they  are 
wrought.  How  different  the  power  of  two  men,  creatures 
though  they  be  of  the  same  order ;  a  Newton,  for  exam- 
ple, a  Watt,  a  Fulton ;  and  some  wild  Patagonian  or  stunted 
Esquimaux.  So,  if  there  be  angels,  seraphim,  thrones, 
dominions,  all  in  ascending  scales  of  endowment  above 
one  another,  they  will,  of  course,  have  powers  supernatu- 


60  SO    ALSO    IS    GOD, 

ral,  or  capacities  to  act  on  the  lines  of  causes  in  nature, 
that  correspond  with  their  natural  quantity  and  degree. 
"What  wonder,  then,  is  it,  in  the  case  of  Jesus  Christ,  that 
he  reveals  a  power  over  nature,  appropriate  to  the  scale  of 
his  being  and  the  inherent  supremacy  of  his  divine 
person. 

And  yet,  it  will  not  do,  our  philosophers  tell  us,  to  ad- 
mit any  such  thing  as  a  miracle,  or  that  any  thing  does, 
or  can,  take  place  by  a  divine  power,  which  nature  itself 
does  not  bring  to  pass !  God,  in  other  words,  can  not  be 
supposed  to  act  on  the  line  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature ; 
for  nature  is  the  universe,  and  the  law  of  universal  order 
makes  a  perfect  system.  Hence  a  great  many  of  our  nat- 
uralists, who  admit  the  existence  of  God,  and  do  not  mean 
to  identify  his  substance  with  nature,  and  call  him  the 
Creator,  and  honor  him,  at  least  in  words,  as  the  Governor 
of  all  things,  do  yet  insist  that  it  must  be  unphilosophical 
to  suppose  any  present  action  of  God,  save  what  is  acted 
in  and  through  the  preordained  system  of  nature.  The 
author  of  the  Yestiges  of  Creation,  for  example,  (p.  118,) 
looks  on  cause  and  effect  as  being  the  eternal  will  of  God, 
and  nature  as  the  all-comprehensive  order  of  his  Provi- 
dence, beside  which,  or  apart  from  which,  he  does,  and 
can  be  supposed  to  do,  nothing.  A  great  many  who  call 
themselves  Christian  believers,  really  hold  the  same  thing, 
and  can  suffer  nothing  different.  Nature,  to  such,  in- 
cludes man.  God  and  nature,  then,  are"  the  all  of  exist- 
ence, and  there  is  no  acting  of  God  upon  nature ;  for  that 
would  be  supernaturalism.  He  may  be  the  originative 
source  of  nature ;  he  may  even  be  the  immediate,  all-im- 
pelling will,  of  which  cause  and  effect  are  the  symptoms ; 
that  is  he  may  have  made,  and  may  actuate  the  machine, 


OTHERWISE    A    NULLITY,  61 

in  that  fated,  foredoomed  way  which  cause  and  effect  de- 
scribes, but  he  must  not  act  upon  the  machine-system  out- 
side of  the  foredoomed  way ;  if  he  does,  he  will  disturb 
the  immutable  laws !  In  fact,  he  has  no  liberty  of  doing 
any  thing,  but  just  to  keep  agoing  the  everlasting  trundle 
of  the  machine.  He  can  not  even  act  upon  his  works, 
save  as  giving  and  maintaining  the  natural  law  of  his 
works ;  which  law  is  a  limit  upon  Him,  as  truly  as  a  bond 
of  order  upon  them.  He  is  incrusted  and  shut  in  by  his 
own  ordinances.  Nature  is  the  god  above  God,  and  he 
can  not  cross  her  confines.  His  ends  are  all  in  nature ; 
for,  outside  of  nature,  and  beyond,  there  is  nothing  but 
Himself.  He  is  only  a  great  mechanic,  who  has  made  a 
great  machine  for  the  sake  of  the  machine,  having  his 
work  all  done  long  ages  ago.  Moral  government  is  out 
of  the  question — there  is  no  government  but  the  predes- 
tined rolling  of  the  machine.  If  a  man  sins,  the  sin  is 
only  the  play  of  cause  and  effect ;  that  is,  of  the  machine. 
If  he  repents,  the  same  is  true — sin,  repentance,  love, 
hope,  joy,  are  all  developments  of  cause  and  effect ;  that 
is,  of  the  machine.  If  a  soul  gives  itself  to  God  in  love, 
the  love  is  but  a  grinding-out  of  some  wheel  he  has  set 
turning,  or  it  may  be  turns,  in  the  scheme  of  nature.  If  I 
look  up  to  him  and  call  him  Father,  he  can  only  pity  the 
conceit  of  my  filial  feeling,  knowing  that  it  is  attributable 
to  nothing  but  the  run  of  mere  necessary  cause  and  effect 
in  me,  and  is  no  more,  in  fact,  from  me,  than  the  rising  of 
a  mist  or  cloud  is  from  some  buoyant  freedom  in  its  par- 
ticles. If  I  look  up  to  him  for  help  and  deliverance,  He 
can  only  hand  me  over  to  cause  and  effect,  of  which  I 
am  a  link  myself,  and  bid  me  stay  in  my  place  to  be 
what  I  am  made  to  be.  He  can  touch  me  by  no 


62  A    BEING    ENTOMBED 

extension  of  sympathy,  and  I  must  even  break  through 
nature  (as  He  Himself  can  not,)  to  obtain  a  look  of  recog- 
nition. 

How  miserable  a  desert  is  existence,  both  to  Him 
and  to  us,  under  such  conditions — to  Him,  because  of 
his  character;  to  us,  because  of  our  wants.  To  be 
thus  entombed  in  his  works,  to  have  no  scope  for  his 
virtues,  no  field  for  his  perfections,  no  ends  to  seek, 
no  liberty  to  act,  save  in  the  mechanical  way  of  mere 
causality — what  could  more  effectually  turn  his  goodness 
into  a  well-spring  of  baffled  desires  and  defeated  sympa- 
thies, and  make  His  glory  itself  a  baptism  of  sorrow. 
Meantime  the  supposition  is,  to  us,  a  mockery,  against 
which  all  our  deepest  wants  and  highest  personal  affini- 
ties are  raised  up,  as  it  were,  in  mutinous  protest.  If 
there  is  nothing  but  God  and  nature,  and  God  Himself 
has  no  relations  to  nature,  save  just  to  fill  it  and  keep 
it  on  its  way,  then,  being  ourselves  a  part  of  nature,  we 
are  only  a  link,  each  one,  in  a  chain  let  down  into  a  well, 
where  nothing  else  can  ever  touch  us  but  the  next  link 
above  1  0,  it  is  horrible !  Our  soul  freezes  at  the 
thought !  We  want,  we  must  have,  something  better — a 
social  footing,  a  personal,  and  free,  and  flexible,  and 
conscious  relation  with  our  God ;  that  he  should  cross 
over  to  us,  or  bring  us  over  the  dark  Styx  of  nature 
unto  Himself,  to  love  Him,  to  obtain  His  recognition, 
to  receive  His  manifestation,  to  walk  in  His  guidance, 
and  be  raised  to  that  higher  footing  of  social  under- 
standing and  spiritual  concourse  with  Him,  where  our 
inborn  affinities  find  their  center  and  rest.  And  what 
we  earnestly  want,  we  know  that  we  shall  assuredly 
find.  The  prophecy  is  in  us,  and  whether  we  call 


IN    HIS    WORKS.  63 

ourselves  prophets  or  not,  we  shall  certainly  go  on  to 
publish  it.  It  is  the  inevitable,  first  fact  of  natural  convic- 
tion with  us.  Do  we  not  know,  each  one,  that  he  is 
more  than  a  thing  or  a  wheel,  and,  being  consciously 
a  man,  a  spirit,  a  creature  supernatural,  will  he 
hesitate  to  claim  a  place  with  such,  and  claim  for  such 
a  place  ? 


CHAPTER  III. 

NATURE  IS  NOT   THE   SYSTEM   OF  GOD. -THINGS  AND  POW- 
ERS,  HOW  RELATED. 

GrOD  is  expressed  but  not  measured  by  his  works; 
least  of  all,  by  the  substances  and  laws  included  under  the 
general  term,  nature.  And  yet,  how  liable  are  we,  over- 
powered, as  we  often  are,  and  oppressed  by  the  magni- 
tudes of  nature,  to  suffer  the  impression  that  there  can  be 
nothing  separate  and  superior,  beyond  nature.  The 
eager  mind  of  science,  for  example,  sallying  forth  on 
excursions  of  thought  into  the  vast  abysses  of  worlds,  dis- 
covering tracks  of  light  that  must  have  been  shooting 
downward  and  away  from  their  sources,  even  for  millions 
of  ages,  to  have  now  arrived  at  their  mark ;  and  then  dis- 
covering also  that,  by  such  a  reach  of  computation,  it 
has  not  penetrated  to  the  center,  but  only  reached  the 
margin  or  outmost  shore  of  the  vast  fire-ocean,  whose 
particles  are  astronomic  worlds,  falls  back  spent,  and, 
having,  as  it  were,  no  spring  left  for  another  trial,  or  the 
endeavor  of  a  stronger  flight,  surrenders,  overmastered 
and  helpless,  crushed  into  silence.  At  such  an  hour,  it 
is  any  thing  but  a  wonder  that  nature  is  taken  for  the  all, 
the  veritable  system  of  God ;  beyond  which,  or  collateral 
with  which,  there  is  nothing.  For  so  long  a  time  is 
science  imposed  upon  by  nature,  not  instructed  by  it ;  as 
if  there  could  be  nothing  greater  than  distance,  measure, 
quantity,  and  show,  nothing  higher  than  the  formal  plati- 
tude of  things.  But  the  healthy,  living  mind  will,  sooner 
or  later,  recover  itself.  It  will  spring  up  out  of  this  pros- 
tration before  nature,  to  imagine  other  things,  which  eye 


NATURAL    MAGNITUDES    OPPRESSIVE.         65 

hath  not  seen,  nor  ear  heard,  nor  science  computed.  It 
will  discover  fires,  even  in  itself,  that  flame  above  the 
stars.  It  will  break  over  and  through  the  narrow  con- 
fines of  stellar  organization,  to  conceive  a  spiritual  Kos- 
mos,  or  divine  system,  which  contains,  and  uses,  and  is 
only  shadowed  in  the  faintest  manner  by,  the  prodigious 
trivialities  of  external  substance.  Indeed,  I  think  all 
minds  unsophisticated  by  science,  or  not  disempowered 
by  external  magnitudes,  will  conceive  God  as  a  being 
whose  fundamental  plan,  whose  purpose,  end,  and  system 
are  nowise  measured  by  that  which  lies  in  dimension, 
even  though  the  dimensions  be  measureless.  They  will 
say  with  Zophar  still, — "The  measure  thereof  is  longer 
than  the  earth  and  broader  than  the  sea."  And  the  real, 
proper  universe  of  God,  that  which  is  to  God  the  final 
cause  of  all  things,  will  be  to  them  a  realm  so  far  trans- 
cending the  outward  immensity,  both  in  quantity  and 
kind,  that  this  latter  will  be  scarcely  more  than  some 
outer  gate  of  approach,  or  eyelet  of  observation. 

What  I  propose,  then,  in  the  present  chapter,  coinci- 
dently  with  the  strain  of  remark  here  indulged,  is  to 
undertake  a  negative,  showing  (what,  in  fact,  is  decisive 
upon  the  whole  question,)  that  the  surrender  of  so  many 
minds  to  nature  and  her  magnitudes  is  premature  and 
weak ;  that  nature  plainly  is  not,  and  can  not  be,  the  proper 
and  complete  system  of  God ;  or,  if  we  speak  no  more  of 
God,  of  the  universe. 

It  would  seem  that  any  really  thoughtful  person,  when 
about  to  surrender  himself  to  nature,  in  the  manner  just 
described,  must  be  detained  by  a  simple  glance  at  the 
manifest  yearning  of  the  human  race,  in  all  ages  and 

6* 


66  HUMAN    NATURE    CRAVES 

nations,  for  something  supernatural.  Their  affinity  for 
objects  supernatural  is  far  more  evident,  as  a  matter  of 
history,  than  for  objects  scientific  and  natural.  Instead  of 
reducing  their  gods  and  religions  to  the  terms  of  nature, 
they  have  peopled  nature  with  gods,  and  turned  even  their 
agriculture  into  a  concert,  or  concurrence,  with  the  un- 
seen powers  and  their  ministries.  Witness,  in  this  view, 
the  immense  array  of  mythologic  and  formally  unrational 
religions,  extinct  or  still  existing,  that  have  been  accepted 
by  the  populations  of  the  world.  Notice  in  particular 
also,  that,  when  the  keen  dialectics  of  the  polished  Greeks 
and  Romans  had  cut  away  the  foundations  of  their  re- 
ligions, instead  of  lapsing  into  the  cold  no-religion  of  the 
Sophists,  the  cultivated  mind  of  their  scholars  and 
philosophers  passed  straight  by  the  boasted  reason,  to  lay 
hold  of  Christianity ;  and  Christianity,  more  rational  but 
in  no  degree  less  supei  natural  than  the  religions  over- 
turned, was  accepted  as  the  common  faith.  And  what  is 
not  less  remarkable,  Christianity  itself,  as  if  not  supernat- 
ural enough,  was  corrupted  by  the  addition  of  still  new 
wonders  pertaining  to  the  virgin,  the  priesthood,  the  sac- 
raments, and  even  the  bones  of  the  saints;  indicated  all, 
and  some  of  them  (such  as  that  Mary  is  the  Mother  of 
God,)  generated  even,  by  dialectic  processes.  And  so  it 
ever  has  been.  Men  can  as  well  subsist  in  a  vacuum,  or 
on  a  mere  metallic  earth,  attended  by  no  vegetable  or  ani- 
mal products,  as  they  can  stay  content  with  mere  cause 
and  effect,  and  the  endless  cycle  of  nature.  They  may 
drive  themselves  into  it,  for  the  moment,  by  their  specula- 
tions ;  but  the  desert  is  too  dry,  and  the  air  too  thin — they 
can  not  stay.  Accordingly,  we  find  that  just  now,  when 
the  propensities  to  mere  naturalism  are.  so  manifold  and 


A    SUPEBNATURAL    RELIGION.  67 

eager,  they  are  yet  instigated  in  their  eagerness  itself  by 
an  impulse  that  scorns  all  the  boundaries  of  mere  knowl- 
edge and  reason ;  that  is,  by  an  appetite  for  things  of  faith, 
or  a  hope  of  yet  fresher  miracles  and  greater  mysteries — 
gazing  after  the  Boreal  crown  of  Fourier,  and  the  thaw- 
ing out  of  the  poles  under  the  heat  of  so  great  felicity  to 
come ;  or  watching  at  the  gate  of  some  third  heaven  to  be 
opened  by  the  magnetic  passes,  or  the  solemn  incantations 
of  the  magic  circles ;  expecting  an  irruption  of  demons, 
in  the  name  of  science,  more  fantastic  than  even  that 
which  plagued  the  world  in  the  days  of  Christ,  and  which 
so  many  critics,  in  the  name  also  of  science,  were  just 
now  laboring  most  intently  to  weed  out  of  the  gospel  his- 
tory. True,  the  magnetic  revelations  are  said  to  be  in 
the  way  of  nature ;  no  matter  for  that,  if  only  they  are 
wonderful  enough ;  all  the  better,  indeed,  if  they  give  us 
things  supernatural  to  enjoy  and  live  in,  without  the 
name.  Only  we  must  have  mysteries,  and  believe,  and 
take  wings,  and  fly  clear  of  the  dull  level  of  comprehen- 
sible cause  and  substance,  somehow.  Such  is  man,  such 
are  we  all. 

We  are  like  the  poet  Shelley,  who,  after  he  had  sunk 
into  blank  atheism,  as  regards  religion,  could  not  stay  con- 
tent, but  began  forthwith  to  people  his  brain  and  the 
world  with  griffins,  and  gorgons,  and  animated  rings,  and 
fiery  serpents,  and  spirits  of  water  and  wind,  and  became, 
in  fact,  the  most  mythologic  of  all  modern  poets;  only 
that  he  made  his  mythologic  machinery  himself,  out  of 
the  delirious  shapes  exhaled  from  the  deep  atheistic  hunger 
of  his  soul.  And  the  new  Mormon  faith,  or  fanaticism, 
that  strangest  phenomenon  of  our  times — what  is  it,  in 
fact,  but  a  breaking  loose  by  the  human  soul,  pressed 


68  SHELLEY'S  MYTHOLOGY. 

down  by  ignorance  and  unbelief  together,  to  find  some 
element  of  miracle  and  mystery,  in  which  it  may  range 
and  feed  its  insatiable  appetite ;  a  raw  and  truculent  im- 
posture of  supernaturalism,  dug  up  out  of  the  earth  but 
yesterday,  which,  just  because  it  is  not  under  reason 
and  is  held  by  no  stays  of  opinion,  kindles  the  fires 
of  the  soul's  eternity  to  a  pitch  of  fierceness  and  a 
really  devastating  energy.  And  were  the  existing  faith 
of  powers  unseen  and  worlds  above  the  world  of  science 
blotted  out,  leaving  us  shut  down  under  atheism,  or  mere 
nature,  and  gasping  in  the  dull  vacuum  it  makes,  I  verily 
believe  that  we  should  instantly  begin  to  burst  up  all  into 
Mormonism,  or  some  other  newly  invented  faith,  no  better 
authenticated. 

Into  this  same  gasping  state,  in  fact,  we  are  thrown  by 
our  new  school  of  naturalistic  literature,  and  we  can  easily 
distinguish,  in  the  conscious  discontent  that  nullifies 
both  our  pleasure  and  praise,  the  fact  of  some  transcend- 
ent, inborn  affinity,  by  which  we  are  linked  to  things 
above  the  range  of  mere  nature.  Who  is  a  finer  master 
of  English  than  Mr.  Emerson?  Who  offers  fresher 
thoughts,  in  shapes  of  beauty  more  fascinating  ?  Intoxi- 
cated by  his  brilliant  creations,  the  reader  thinks,  for  the 
time,  that  he  is  getting  inspired.  And  yet,  when  he  has 
closed  the  essay  or  the  volume,  he  is  surprised  to  find — 
who  has  ever  failed  to  notice  it? — that  he  is  disabled 
instead,  disempowered,  reduced  hi  tone.  He  has  no  great 
thought  or  purpose  in  him;  and  the  force  or  capacity  for 
it  seems  to  be  gone.  Surely,  it  is  a  wonderfully  clear 
atmosphere  that  he  is  in,  and  yet  it  is  somehow  mephitic ! 
How  could  it  be  otherwise  ?  As  it  is  a  first  principle  that 
water  will  not  rise  above  its  own  level,  what  better  reason 


EMERSON'S  BBAMINISM.  69 

is  there  to  expect  that  a  creed  which  disowns  duty  and 
turns  achievement  into  a  conceit  of  destiny,  will  bring  to 
man  those  great  thoughts,  and  breathe  upon  him  in  those 
gales  of  impulse,  which  are  necessary  to  the  empowered 
state,  whether  of  Bought  or  of  action.  Grazing  in  the 
field  of  nature  is  not  enough  for  a  being  whose  deepest 
affinities  lay  hold  of  the  supernatural,  and  reach  after 
God.  Airy  and  beautiful  the  field  may  be,  shown  by  so 
great  a  master;  full  of  goodly  prospects  and  fascinating 
images ;  but,  without  a  living  God,  and  objects  of  faith, 
and  terms  of  duty,  it  is  a  pasture  only — nothing  more. 
Hence  the  unreadiness,  the  almost  aching  incapacity  felt 
to  undertake  any  thing  or  become  any  thing,  by  one  who 
has  taken  lessons  at  this  school.  Nature  is  the  all,  and 
nature  will  do  every  thing,  whether  we  will  or  no.  Call 
it  duty,  greatness,  heroism,  still  it  is  hers,  and  she  will 
have  more  of  it  when  she  pleases.  If,  then,  nature  does 
not  set  him  on  also,  and  do  all  in  him,  there  is  an  end ; 
what  can  he  expect  to  do  in  the  name  of  duty,  faith, 
sacrifice,  and  high  resolve,  when  nature  is  not  in  the  plan? 
What  better,  indeed,  is  there  left  him,  or  more  efficient, 
than  just  to  think  beautiful  thoughts,  if  he  can,  and  sur- 
render himself  to  the  luxury  of  watching  the  play  of  his 
own  reflective  egoism?  Given  Brama  for  a  god  and 
a  religion,  what  is  left  us  more  certainly  than  that  we  our- 
selves become  Asiatics?  Such  kind  of  influence  would 
turn  the  race  to  pismires,  if  only  we  could  stay  content  in 
it,  as  happily  we  can  not ;  for,  if  we  chance  to  find  our 
pleasure  in  it  for  an  hour,  a  doom  as  strong  as  eternity  in 
us  compels  us  finally  to  spurn  it,  as  a  brilliant  inanity. 

But  we  are  going  further  with   our  point  than   we 
intended.     Admitting  the  universal  tendency  of  the  race, 


70  THE    HOST    IN    OPPOSITION 

in  past  ages,  to  a  faith  in  things  supernatural,  it  may  be 
imagined  by  some  that,  as  we  advance  in  culture,  we 
must  finally  reach  a  stage,  where  reason  will  enforce  a 
different  demand;  they  may  even  return  upon  us  the 
list  we  gave,  in  our  introductory  chapter,  of  the  parties 
now  conspiring  the  overthrow  of  a  supernatural  faith, 
requiring  us  to  accept  them  as  proofs  that  the  more 
advanced  stage  of  culture  is  now  about  to  be  reached.  In 
that  case,  it  is  enough  to  answer  that  the  naturalizing 
habit  of  our  times  is  clearly  no  indication  of  any  such 
new  stage  of  advancement,  but  only  a  phase  of  social  tend- 
ency once  before  displayed  in  the  negative  and  destruct- 
ive era  of  the  Greek  and  Eoman  religions ;  also  that  the 
grand  conspiracy,  exhibited  in  our  own  time,  signifies 
much  less  than  it  would,  if,  after  all,  there  were  any  real 
agreement  among  the  parties.  Thus  it  will  be  found  that, 
while  they  seem  to  agree  in  the  assumption  that  nature 
includes  every  thing,  and  also  to  show  by  their  imposing 
air  of  concert  that  in  this  way  the  world  must  needs  grav- 
itate, there  is  yet,  if  we  scan  them  more  carefully,  no  such 
agreement  as  indicates  any  solid  merit  in  their  opinion,  or 
even  such  as  may  properly  entitle  them  to  respect. 

Thus  we  find,  first  of  all,  a  threefold  distribution 
among  them  that  sets  them  in  as  many  schools,  or  tiers, 
between  which  there  is  almost  nothing  in  common ;  one 
section  or  school  maintaining  that  nature  is  God,  another 
that  it  is  originally  the  work  of  God,  and  a  third  that 
there  is  no  God.  If  nature  itself  is  God,  then  plainly 
God  is  not  the  Creator  of  nature  by  his  own  sovereign 
act ;  and  if  there  is  no  God,  then  he  is  neither  nature  nor 
its  Creator.  Their  agreement,  therefore,  includes  noth- 
ing but  a  point  of  denial  respecting  the  supernatural, 


ALSO    CONTRADICT    EACH    OTHER.  71 

maintained  for  wholly  opposite  and  contradictory  reasons. 
So,  as  regards  religion  itself;  to  some  it  is  a  natural  effect 
or  growth  in  souls,  and  in  that  view  a  fact  that  evinces 
the  real  sublimity  of]  nature ;  while  to  others  it  is  itself  a 
matter  only  of  contempt,  a  creation  of  priestly  artifice,  or 
an  excrescence  of  blind  superstition.  One,  again,  believes 
in  the  personality,  responsibility,  and  immortality  of  souls, 
rinding  a  moral  government  in  nature,  and  even  what  he 
calls  a  gospel;  another,  that  man  is  a  mere  link  in  the 
chain  of  causalities,  like  the  insects,  responsibility  a 
fiction,  eternity  a  fond  illusion ;  and  still  another  that, 
being  a  mere  link  in  the  chain  of  causalities,  he  will  yet 
forever  be,  and  be  happy  in  the  consciousness  that  he  is. 
The  contrarieties,  in  short,  are  endless,  and  accordingly 
the  weight  of  their  apparent  concert,  when  set  against  the 
general  vote  and  appetite  of  the  race  for  something  super- 
natural, is  wholly  insignificant.  If  it  be  a  token  of 
advancing  culture,  it  certainly  is  not  any  token  that  a 
wiser  age  of  reason  or  scientific  understanding  is  yet 
reached;  and  the  grand  major  vote  of  the  race,  for  a 
supernatural  faith,  is  nowise  weakened  by  it.  Still  it  is  a 
fact,  the  universal  fact  of  history,  that  man  is  a  creature 
of  faith,  and  can  not  rest  in  mere  nature  and  natural  caus- 
ality. Nothing  will  content  him  in  the  faith  that  nature 
is  the  all,  or  universal  system  of  being. 

But  the  indications  we  discover  within  the  realm  of 
nature,  or  of  cause  and  effect,  are  more  striking  even 
than  those  which  <we  discover  in  the  demonstrations  of  our 
own  history.  We\ave  spoken  of  a  system  supernatural, 
superior  to  the  system  of  nature,  and  subordinating 
always  the 4 latter  to  itself;  understanding,  however,  that 


72  NATURE    ITSELF    OFFERS    TYPES 

both  together,  in  the  truest  and  most  proper  sense,  consti- 
tute the  real  universal  system  of  (rod.  Now,  as  if  to 
show  us  the  possibility,  and  familiarize  to  us  the  fact  of  a 
subordination  thus  of  one  system  and  its  laws  to  the  uses 
and  superior  behests  of  another,  we  have,  in  the  domain 
of  nature  herself,  two  grand  systems  of  chemistry,  or  chem- 
ical force  and  action ;  one  of  which  comes  down  upon  the 
other,  always  from  without,  to  dominate  over  it,  decompos- 
ing substances  which  the  other  has  composed,  producing 
substances  which  the  other  could  not.  We  speak  here,  it 
will  be  understood,  of  what  is  called  inorganic  chemistry, 
and  vital  chemistry,  the  chemistry  of  matter  out  of  life  or 
below  it,  and  of  that  which  is  in  it  and  by  it.  The  lives 
that  construct  and  organize  the  bodies  they  inhabit,  are 
the  highest  forms  of  nature,  and  are  set  in  nature  as  types 
of  a  yet  higher  order  of  existence ;  viz.,  spirit,  or  free 
intelligence.  They  are  immaterial,  having  neither  weight 
nor  dimensions  of  their  own ;  and  what  is  yet  closer  to 
mind,  they  act  by  no  dynamic  force,  or  impulsion,  but 
from  themselves;  coming  down  upon  matter,  as  architects 
and  chemists,  to  do  their  own  will,  as  it  were,  upon  the 
raw  matter  and  the  dead  chemistry  of  the  world.  We 
say  not  that  they  have  in  truth  a  will ;  they  only  have  a 
certain  plastic  instinct,  by  which  their  dominating  chemis- 
try is  actuated,  and  their  architectural  forms  are  supplied. 
We  have  thus  a  world  immaterial  within  the  boundaries 
of  cause  and  effect ;  for  the  plastic  instinct  has  causes  of 
action  in  itself,  and  acts  under  a  necessity  as  absolute  as 
the  inorganic  forces.  It  belongs  to  nature,  and  not  to  the 
supernatural,  because  it  is  really  in  the  chain  of  cause  and 
effect,  and  is  only  a  quasi  power.  The  manner  of  work- 
ing, in  these  plastic  chemistries,  no  science  can  dis- 


OF    SUPERNATURAL    AGENCY,  73 

cover  and  their  products  no  science  can  imitate. 
Elements  that  are  united  by  the  laws  of  matter  they  will 
somehow  resolve  and  separate,  and  elements  which  no 
laws  of  matter  have  ever  united,  they  will  bring  into  a  mys- 
tic union,  congenial  to  their  own  forms  and  uses.  Thus, 
in  place  of  the  few  distinct  substances  we  should  have, 
were  the  earth  left  to  its  pure  metallic  state,  invaded  by 
none  of  these  myrmidons  of  life  and  the  chemistries  they 
bring  with  them,  we  have,  provided  for  our  use,  immense 
varieties  of  substances  which  can  not  even  be  recount- 
ed— woods,  meats,  bones,  oils,  wools,  furs,  grains,  gums, 
spices,  sweets,  the  fruits,  the  medicines,  the  grasses,  the 
flowers,  the  odors — representatives  all  of  so  many  lives, 
working  in  the  clay,  to  produce  what  none  but  their  exter- 
nal chemistry,  entering  into  the  clay  in  silent  sovereignty, 
can  summon  it  to  yield.  They  are  types  in  nature  of  the 
supernatural  and  its  power  to  subordinate  the  laws  of  na- 
ture. They  come  as  God's  mute  prophets,  throwing  down 
their  rods  upon  the  ground,  as  Moses  did,  that  we  may 
see  their  quickening  and  believe.  We  do  believe  that 
they  contain  a  higher  tier  of  chemical  forces,  superior  to 
the  lower  tier  of  forces  in  the  dead  matter,  and  we  are 
nowise  shocked  by  the  miracle,  when  we  see  them  quicken 
the  dead  matter  into  life,  and  work  it  by  their  magic  pow- 
er into  substances,  whose  affinities  were  not  inherent  in 
the  matter,  but  in  the  subtle  chemists  of  vitality  by 
whom  they  were  fashioned. 

Nothing  is  better  understood,  for  example,  than  that 
the  three  elements  of  the  sugar  principle  have  no  discov- 
erable affinity  by  which  they  unite,  and  that  no  utmost 
art  of  science  has  ever  been  able,  under  the  inorganic 
laws  of  matter,  to  unite  them.  They  never  do  unite,  save 

7 


74  AS    DE.  STRAUSS    HIMSELF 

by  the  imposed  chemistry  of  the  sugar-making  lives. 
And  so  it  is  of  all  vegetable  and  animal  substances.  They 
exist  because  the  system  of  vital  chemistries  is  gifted 
with  a  qualified  sovereignty  over  the  system  of  inor- 
ganic chemistry.  And  it  would  seem  as  if  it  was  the 
special  design  of  God,  in  this  triumph  of  the  lives  over 
the  mineral  order  and  its  laws,  to  accustom  us  to  the  fact 
of  a  subordination  of  causes,  and  make  us  so  familiar  with 
it  as  to  start  no  skepticism  in  us,  when  the  sublimer  face 
of  a  supernatural  agency  in  the  affairs  of  the  world  is  dis- 
covered or  revealed.  For,  if  the  secret  workings,  the  dis- 
solvings, distillations,  absorptions,  conversions,  composi- 
tions, continually  going  on  about  us  and  within,  could  be 
definitely  shown,  there  is  not  any  thing  in  all  the  mytholo- 
gies of  the  race,  the  doings  of  the  gods,  the  tricks  of  fairies, 
the  spells  and  transformations  of  the  wizard  powers,  that 
can  even  approach  the  real  wonders  of  fact  here  displayed. 
And  yet  we  apprehend  no  breach  or  suspension  of  the 
laws  of  dead  matter  in  the  manifest  subordination  they 
suffer;  on  the  contrary,  we  suppose  that  the  dead  mat- 
ter is  thus  subordinated,  in  a  certain  sense,  through  and 
by  its  own  laws.  As  little  reason  have  we  to  apprehend 
a  breach  upon  the  laws  of  nature  in  one  of  Christ's  mira- 
cles. Whatever  yields  to  him,  yields  by  its  own  laws, 
and  not  otherwise.  So  significant  is  the  lesson  given  us 
by  these  myrmidons  of  life,  that  are  filling  the  world  with 
their  activity,  preparing  it  to  their  uses,  and  transforming 
it — otherwise  a  desert — into  a  frame  of  habitable  order 
and  beauty. 

It  is  remarkable  that  even  Dr.  Strauss  takes  note  of 

this  same  peculiarity  observable  in  the  works  of  nature. 

'It  is  true,"  he  says,   "that   single  facts   and   groups 


CANDIDLY    ADMITS.  75 

of  facts,  with  their  conditions  and  processes  of  change, 
are  not  so  circumscribed  as  to  be  unsusceptible  of  ex- 
ternal influence;  for  the  action  of  one  existence  or 
kingdom  in  nature  trenches  on  that  of  another;  human 
freedom  controls  natural  development,  and  material  laws 
react  on  human  freedom.  Nevertheless,  the  totality  of 
finite  things  forms  a  vast  circle,  which,  except  that  it  owes 
its  existence  and  laws  to  a  superior  power,  suffers  no 
intrusion  from  without.  This  conviction  is  so  much  a 
habit  of  thought  with  the  modern  world,  that  in  actual 
life  the  belief  in  a  supernatural  manifestation,  an  immedi- 
ate divine  agency,  is  at  once  attributed  to  ignorance  or 
imposture."*  But,  what  if  it  should  happen  that  above 
this  "totality  of  things"  there  is  a  grand  totality  superior 
to  things  ?  Wherein  is  it  more  incredible  that  this  higher 
totality  should  exert  a  subordinating  "external  influence" 
on  the  whole  of  things,  than  that  "one  kingdom  in  nature 
trenches  on  another?"  Why  may  not  men,  angels,  God, 
subordinate  and  act  upon  the  whole  of  what  is  properly 
called  nature  ?  and  what  are  all  the  organific  powers  in 
nature  doing  but  giving  us  a  type  of  the  truth,  to  make  it 
familiar  ?  And  then  how  little  avails  the  really  low  ap- 
peal from  such  a  testimony  to  the  current  unbeliefs  and 
crudities  of  a  superficial,  coarse-minded,  unthinking 
world?  It  is  not  these  which  can  convict  such  opin- 
ions of  "ignorance  or  imposture."  Had  this  writer, 
on  the  contrary,  observed  that  the  subordination  of  one 
kingdom  of  nature  and  its  laws  to  the  action  of  anoth- 
er, covers  all  the  difficulties  of  the  question  of  miracles, 
he  could  have  had  some  better  title  to  the  name  of  a 
philosopher. 

*Life  of  Jesus,  VoL  I,  p.  71. 


76  GEOLOGY    FURNISHES 

Meantime,  while  we  are  familiarized,  in  this  manner, 
with  the  subordination  of  one  system  of  laws  and  forces 
to  another ;  and  prepared  to  admit  the  possibility,  if  we 
should  not  rather  say  forewarned  of  the  actual  existence 
of,  another  system  above  nature  subordinating  that ;  we 
also  meet  with  arguments  incorporated  in  the  works  of 
nature,  that  have  a  sturdier  significance,  rising  up,  as  it 
were,  to  confront  those  coarse  and  truculent  forms  of  skepti- 
cism on  which,  probably,  the  finer  tokens  just  referred  to 
would  be  lost.  The  atheist  denies  the  existence  of  any 
being  or  power  above  nature ;  the  pantheist  does  the 
same — only  adding  that  nature  is  God,  and  entitled  in 
some  sense  to  the  honor  of  religion.  Now,  to  show  the 
existence  of  a  God  supernatural,  a  God  so  far  separated 
from  nature  and  superior  to  it  as  to  act  on  the  chain  of 
natural  cause  and  effect  from  without  the  chain,  the  new 
science  of  geology  comes  forward,  lays  open  her  stone 
registers,  and  points  us  to  the  very  times  and  places  where 
the  creative  hand  of  God  was  inserted  into  the  world,  to 
people  it  with  creatures  of  life.  Thus  it  is  an  accepted  or 
established  fact  in  geology,  that  our  planet  was,  at  some 
remote  period,  in  a  molten  or  fluid  state,  by  reason  of  the 
intense  heat  of  its  matter.  Emerging  from  this  state  by  a 
gradual  cooling  process,  there  could  of  course  be  no  seeds 
in  it  and  no  vestiges  or  germs  of  animal  life.  It  is  only 
a  vast  cinder,  in  fact,  just  now  a  little  cooled  on  the  sur- 
face, but  still  red  hot  within.  And  yet  the  registers  show, 
beyond  the  possibility  even  of  a  doubt,  that  the  cinder 
was,  in  due  time  and  somehow,  peopled  with  creatures  of 
life.  Whence  came  they  or  the  germs  of  which  they 
sprung  ?  Out  of  the  fire,  or  out  of  the  cinder  ?  The  fire 
would  exterminate  them  all  in  a  minute  of  time,  and  it 


ANOTHER  KIND  OF  PROOF.         77 

will  be  difficult  to  imagine  that  the  cinder,  the  mere  me- 
tallic matter  of  the  world,  has  any  power  to  resolve  itself, 
under  its  material  laws,  into  reproductive  and  articulated 
forms  of  life.  .X 

Again,  these  ancient  registers  of  rock  record  the  fact  that, 
here  and  there,  some  vast  fiery  cataclysm  broke  loose,  sub- 
merging and  exterminating  a  great  part  of  the  living  tribes 
of  the  world,  after  which  came  forth  new  races  of  occu- 
pants, more  numerous  and  many  of  them  higher  and  more 
perfect  in  their  forms  of  organization.  Whence  came 
these  ?  By  what  power  ever  discovered  in  nature  were 
they  invented,  composed,  articulated,  and  set  breathing  in 
the  air  and  darting  through  the  waters  of  the  world  ? 

Finally  man  appears,  last  and  most  perfect  of  all  the 
living  forms;  for,  while  so  many  successive  orders  and 
types  of  living  creatures,  vegetable  and  animal,  show  us 
their  remains  in  the  grand  museum  of  the  rocks,  no  ves- 
tige, or  bone,  or  sign  of  man  has  ever  yet  been  discovered 
there.  Therefore  here,  again,  the  question  returns, 
whence  came  the  lordly  occupant  ?  Where  was  he  con- 
ceived ?  In  what  alembic  of  nature  was  he  distilled?  By 
what  conjunction  of  material  causes  was  he  raised  up  to 
look  before  and  after,  and  be  the  investigator  of  all 
causes? 

Having  now  these  facts  of  new  production  before  us, 
we  are  obliged  to  admit  some  power  out  of  nature  and 
above  it,  which,  by  acting  on  the  course  of  nature,  started 
the  new  forms  of  organized  life,  or  fashioned  the  germs 
out  of  which  they  sprung.  To  enter  on  a  formal  discussion 
of  the  theory,  so  ambitiously  attempted  by  some  of  the 
naturalists,  by  which  they  are  ascribed  to  the  laws  of 
mere  nature  or  to  natural  development,  would  carry  me 

7* 


78  IT    REFUTES 

farther  into  the  polemics  of  geology  and  zoology  than  the 
limits  of  my  present  argument  will  suffer.  I  will  only 
notice  two  or  three  of  the  principal  points  of  this  devel- 
opment theory,  in  which  it  is  opposed  by  insurmountable 
facts.* 

First  of  all,  it  requires  us  to  believe  that  the  original 
germs  of  organic  life  may  be  and  were  developed  out  of 
matter  by  its  inorganic  forces.  If  so,  why  are  no  new 
germs  developed  now  ?  and  why  have  we  no  well-attested 
facts  of  the  kind?  Some  few  pretended  facts  we  have, 
but  they  are  too  loosely  made  out  to  be  entitled,  for  a  mo- 
ment, to  our  serious  belief.  Never  yet  has  it  been  shown 
that  any  one  germ  of  vegetable,  or  animal  life,  has  been 
developed  by  the  existing  laws  of  nature,  without  some 
egg  or  germ  previously  supplied  to  start  the  process.  Be- 
sides, it  is  inconceivable  that  there  is  a  power  in  the  metal- 
lic and  earthy  substances,  or  atoms,  however  cunningly 
assisted  by  electricity,  to  generate  a  seed  or  egg.  If  we 
ourselves  can  not  even  so  much  as  cast  a  bullet  without  a 
mold,  how  can  these  dead  atoms  and  blind  electric  cur- 
rents, without  any  matrix,  or  even  governing  type,  weave 
the  filaments  and  cast  the  living  shape  of  an  acorn,  or  any 
smallest  seed  ?  There  can  be  no  softer  credulity  than  the 
skepticism  which,  to  escape  the  need  of  a  creative  miracle, 
resorts  to  such  a  faith  as  this. 

But,  supposing  it  possible,  or  credible,  that  certain  germs 
of  life  may  have  been  generated  by  the  inorganic  forces, 

*  Whoever  wishes  to  see  this  subject  handled  more  scientifically  and  in  a 
most  masterly  manner,  may  consult  the  "  Essay  on  Classification"  prefixed 
to  the  great  work  of  Mr.  Agassiz  on  Natural  History,  where  the  conceit 
that  our  animal  and  vegetable  races  were  started  in  their  several  eras  by 
physical  agencies,  without  a  creative  Intelligence,  is  exploded  so  as  to  be 
forever  incapable  of  resuming  even  a  pretense  of  reason. 


THE    DEVELOPMENT    THEORY.  79 

the  development  scheme  has  it  still  on  hand  to  account 
for  the  existence  of  man.  That  he  is  thus  composed  in 
full  size  and  maturity  is  impossible ;  he  must  be  produced, 
if  at  all,  in  the  state  of  infancy.  Two  suppositions,  then, 
are  possible,  and  only  two ;  and  we  find  the  speculations 
of  the  school  vibrating  apparently  between  them.  First, 
that  there  is  a  slow  process  of  advance  in  order,  through 
which  the  lowest  forms  of  life  gradually  develope  those 
which  are  higher  and  more  perfect,  and  finally  culminate 
in  man.  Or,  secondly,  that  there  is  a  power  in  all  vital 
natures,  by  which,  at  distant  but  proper  intervals,  they 
suddenly  produce  some  order  of  being  higher  than  they, 
much  as  we  often  see  in  those  examples  of  propagation 
which  we  denominate,  most  unphilosophically,  lusus  natu- 
rae, and  that  so,  as  the  last  and  highest  luxus,  if  that  were 
a  scientific  conception,  man  appears ;  being,  in  fact,  the 
crown,  or  complete  fulfillment,  of  that  type  of  perfection 
which  pertains  to  all,  even  the  lowest,  forms  of  life.  In 
one  view  the  progress  is  a  regular  gradation ;  in  the  other 
it  is  a  progress  by  leaps  or  stages. 

As  regards  the  former,  it  is  a  fatal  objection  that  no 
such  plastic,  gradual  movement  of  progress  can  be  traced 
in  the  records  of  the  geologic  eras.  All  the  orders,  and 
genera,  and  species,  maintain  their  immovable  distinctions ; 
and  no  trace  can  any  where  be  discovered,  whether  there  or 
in  the  now  living  races,  of  organic  forms  that  are  interme- 
diate and  transitional.  Tokens  may  be  traced  in  the 
rocks  of  a  transitional  development  in  some  given  kind  or 
species,  as  of  the  gradual  process  by  which  a  frog  is  devel- 
oped; but  there  is  no  trace  of  organized  being  midway 
between  the  frog  and  the  horse,  or  of  any  insect  or 
fish,  on  its  way  to  become  a  frog.  Besides,  it  is  wholly 


80  IT    KEFUTES 

inconceivable  that  there  should  be  in  rerum  natura  any 
kind  of  creature  that  is  midway,  or  transitional,  between 
the  oviparous  and  mammal  orders.  Still  further,  if  man  is 
the  terminal  of  a  slow  and  plastic  movement,  or  advance, 
what  has  become  of  the  forms  next  to  man,  just  a  little 
short  of  man?  They  are  not  among  the  living,  nor 
among  the  dead.  No  trace  of  any  such  forms  has  ever 
been  discovered  by  science.  The  monkey  race  have  been 
set  up  as  candidates  for  this  honor.  But,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  degraded  consciousness  that  can  allow  any  creature 
of  language,  duty,  and  reason,  to  speak  of  his  near  affinity 
with  these  creatures,  what  one  of  them  is  there  that  could 
ever  raise  a  human  infant  ?  And  if  none,  there  ought  to 
be  some  intermediate  race,  yet  closer  to  humanity,  that 
can  do  it.  Where  is  this  intermediate  race  ? 

Just  this,  too,  is  the  difficulty  we  encounter  in  the  sec- 
ond form  of  the  theory.  There  neither  is  nor  can  be  any 
middle  position  between  humanity  and  no  humanity.  If 
the  child,  for  child  there  must  be,  is  human,  the  mother 
and  father  must  either  be  human  or  else  mere  animals. 
If  they  have  not  merely  the  power  of  using  means  to 
ends,  but  the  necessary  ideas,  truth,  right,  cause,  space, 
time,  and  also  the  faculty  of  language,  that  is  of  receiving 
the  inner  sense  of  symbols,  which  is  the  infallible  test  of 
intelligence,  \inius  lego,"]  then  they  are  human ;  otherwise 
they  are  animals.  No  matter,  then,  how  high  they  may 
be  in  their  order;  their  human  child  is  a  different  form  of 
being,  with  which,  in  one  view,  they  have  nothing  in  com- 
mon. And  he  is,  by  the  supposition,  born  a  child ;  the 
son  of  an  animal,  but  yet  a  human  child.  And  then  the 
question  rises,  what  animal  is  there,  existing  or  conceiv- 
able, what  accident,  or  power  in  nature,  that  can  nurse  or 


THE    DEVELOPMENT    THEORY.  81 

shelter  from  death,  that  feeblest  and  most  helpless  of  all 
creatures,  a  human  infant  ?  Neither  do  we  find,  as  a  mat- 
ter of  fact,  that  the  animal  races  advance  in  their  nursing 
and  protecting  capacity,  accordingly  as  they  advance  in 
the  scale  of  organization.  The  nearest  approach  to  that 
kind  of  tending  and  protective  capacity,  necessary  to  the 
raising  of  a  human  infant,  any  where  discernible  in  the 
animal  races,  is  found  in  the  marsupial  animals ;  which  are 
yet  far  inferior,  as  regards  both  intelligence  and  organiza- 
tion, to  the  races  of  dogs,  elephants,  and  monkeys.  Nay, 
the  young  salmon,  hatched  in  the  motherhood  of  the  river, 
being  cradled  in  the  soft  waters,  and  having  a  small  sack  of 
food  attached  underneath,  to  support  the  first  weeks  of  their 
infancy,  are  much  better  off  in  their  nursing  than  these 
most  advanced  races.  Any  theory,  in  short,  which  throws 
a  human  child  on  the  care  of  an  animal  parentage,  is 
too  nearly  absurd  to  require  refutation. 

But  there  is  a  scientific  reason  against  this  whole  theory 
of  development,  which  appears  to  be  irresistible ;  viz.,  that 
it  inverts  the  order  of  causes,  and  makes  exactly  that  which 
distinguishes  the  fact  of  death,  the  author  and  cause  of  life. 
For  it  is  precisely  the  wonder,  as  was  just  now  shown,  of 
the  living  creatures,  or  vital  powers,  that,  instead  of  being 
under  the  laws  of  mineral  substances,  they  are  continually 
triumphing  over  them.  Never  do  they  fall  under  and 
submit  to  them,  till  they  die,  and  this  is  death.  Thus, 
when  a  little  nodule  of  living  matter,  called  an  acorn,  is 
placed  in  the  ground,  it  takes  occasion,  so  to  speak,  from 
its  new  conditions,  begins  to  quicken,  opens  its  ducts, 
starts  its  pumps  into  action,  sets  at  work  its  own  wondrous 
powers  of  chemistry,  and  labors  on  through  whole  cen- 
turies, composing  and  building  on  new  lengths  of  wood, 


82  IT    IS    REFUTED    TOO 

till  it  has  raised  into  the  sky,  against  gravity  and  the  laws 
of  dead  chemistry,  a  ponderous  mass  of  many  tons  weight ; 
there  to  stand,  waving  in  triumph  over  the  vanquished 
chemists  of  the  ground,  and  against  the  raging  storms  of 
ages ;  never  to  yield  the  victory  till  the  life  grows  old  by 
exhaustion.  Having  come  now  to  the  limit  of  its  own 
vital  nature,  the  tree  dies ;  whereupon  the  laws  of  inor- 
ganic matter,  over  which  it  had  triumphed,  fall  at  work 
upon  it,  in  their  turn,  to  dissolve  it ;  and,  between  them 
and  gravity,  pulling  it  down  upon  the  ground,  it  is  disin- 
tegrated and  reduced  to  inorganic  dust.  Now  what  the 
theory  in  question  proposes  is,  that  this  same  living  nodule, 
was  originally  developed,  organized,  and  gifted  with  life, 
by  the  laws  of  dead  matter, — laws  that  have  themselves 
been  vanquished,  as  regards  their  force,  by  its  dominating 
sovereignty,  and  never  have  been  able  to  do  any  thing 
more  than  to  dissolve  it  after  it  was  dead. 

We  are  brought,  then,  to  the  conclusion,  which  no  inge- 
nuity of  man  can  escape,  that  the  successive  races  of  liv- 
ing forms  discovered  by  geology  are  fresh  creations,  by  a 
power  out  of  nature  and  above  it  acting  on  nature ;  which, 
it  will  be  remembered,  is  our  definition  of  supernatural- 
ism  itself.  And  this  plainly  is  no  mere  indication,  but  an 
absolute  proof,  that  nature  is  not  the  complete  system  of 
God.  Indeed,  we  may  say,  what  might  well  enough  be 
clear  beforehand,  that,  if  man  is  not  from  eternity,  as 
geology  proves  beyond  a  question,  then  to  imagine  that 
mere  dead  earth,  acted  on  by  its  chemical  and  electric 
forces,  should  itself  originate  sense,  perception,  thought, 
reason,  conscience,  heroism,  and  genius,  is  to  assert,  in  the 
name  of  science,  what  is  more  extravagant  than  all  the 
miracles  even  of  the  Hindoo  mythology. 


BY    OTHER    REASONS.  83 

There  is  yet  another  view  of  nature,  at  once  closer  at 
hand  and  more  familiar,  which  demands  a  great  deal  more 
of  attention  than  it  has  received,  from  those  who  include 
all  existence  in  the  term.  I  speak  of  the  conflicting  and 
mutually  destructive  elements  known  to  be  comprised  in 
it.  In  one  view,  it  appears  to  be  a  glorious  and  complete 
system  of  order ;  in  another,  a  confused  mixture  of  tumult 
and  battle.  One  set  of  powers  is  continually  destroying 
what  another  is,  with  equal  persistency,  creating ;  and  the 
whole  creation  groaneth  and  travaileth  in  pain  together. 
If  then  system  is  that  which  stands  in  the  unity  of  reason, 
by  what  right  are  we  able  to  call  nature  a  system  ?  That 
it  is  a  system,  or  more  properly  part  of  a  system,  I  do  not 
question ;  for  the  subjective  unity  of  reason  is  an  instinct 
so  powerful  in  our  nature,  or  so  nearly  sovereign  over  it, 
that  we  can  never  expel  the  faith  of  such  unity,  even 
when  it  is  objectively  undiscoverable.  What  I  here  insist 
upon  is,  that  nature,  granting  the  most  that  can  be  said  of 
it  as  a  system,  is  manifestly  no  complete  system  in  itself. 
On  the  contrary,  it  takes  on  appearances,  in  all  its  mani- 
festations, that  indicate  the  action  in  it  and  upon  it  of 
powers  extraneous.  It  seems  to  be  no  complete  thing  in 
itself,  otherwise  it  would  flow  in  courses  of  order  and 
harmony,  without  any  such  turbulence  of  conflict  and 
mutual  destruction  as  we  now  see.  We  even  look  upon  it 
as  a  realm  played  upon  by  forces  of  mischief,  mixed  up 
somehow  with  the  disorders  of  disobedient  powers,  or,  at 
least,  penally  accommodated  to  their  state  of  sin,  as  it  was 
originally  subordinated  to  their  uses.  Most  certain  it  is 
that,  if  cause  and  effect  are  universal,  and  in  that  view  a 
complete  universal  system,  such  as  our  pantheistic  and 
other  naturalizing  writers  pretend, — subject  to  no  outside 


84  DISTINCTION    BAISED 

action,  subordinate  to  no  other  and  higher  tiers  of  exist- 
ence,— there  could  be  no  aspects  of  strife  and  tumult  in  the 
plan;  all,  in  such  a  case,  must  represent  the  necessary 
harmony  and  order  of  the  system ;  flowing  together  on, 
down  the  easy  track  of  its  silent,  smooth  eternity.  As  it 
is,  then,  we  have  manifestly  no  sufficient  right  to  speak  of 
system  at  all,  in  the  proper  and  true  meaning  of  the  term, 
till  we  bring  into  the  account  existences  above  nature, 
such  as  have  it  in  their  way  to  will,  and  war,  and  bring  in 
disorder,  presupposing  thus  a  plan  that  includes  possibili- 
ties of  strife  and  conflict.  And  then,  when  we  speak  of 
system,  it  will  be  in  the  sense  of  the  apostle,  when,  passing 
above  the  mere  platitudes  of  things,  he  rises,  in  the  man  • 
ner  already  described,  to  the  contemplation  of  invisible 
dominions  and  powers,  and  of  Christ,  their  everlasting 
head,  and  says  inclusively  of  all  created  beings  in  heaven 
and  inearth, — "For  in  him  all  things  consist."  In  this 
word  "consist"  [standing  together,]  we  have  the  essential 
and  highest  conception  of  system.  Here  is  opened  a 
glimpse  of  the  true  system  of  God ;  any  thing  less,  or 
lower,  or  different,  is  only  a  fiction  of  science,  and  no 
truth. 

But  we  come  to  a  point  more  positive  and  decisive ;  viz., 
that  we  do  positively  know  existences  that  can  not  be  in- 
cluded in  nature,  but  constitute  a  higher  range,  empowered 
to  act  upon  it.  This  higher  range  we  are  ourselves,  as 
already  shown  by  our  definition  of  nature  and  the  super- 
natural in  the  last  chapter.  By  that  definition  we  are  now 
prepared  to  assume  and  formally  assign  the  grand  two- 
fold distinction  of  things  and  persons,  or  things  and  powers. 
All  free  intelligences,  it  was  shown,  the  created  and  the 


BETWEEN    POWERS    AND    THINGS.  85 

uncreated,  are,  as  being  free,  essentially  supernatural  in 
their  action;  having  all,  in  the  matter  of  their  will,  a 
power  transcending  cause  and  effect  in  nature,  by  which 
they  are  able  to  act  on  the  lines  and  vary  the  combinations 
of  natural  causalities.  They  differ,  in  short,  from  every 
thing  that  classes  under  the  term  nature,  in  the  fact  that 
they  act  from  themselves,  uncaused  in  their  action.  They 
are  powers,  not  things ;  the  radical  idea  of  a  power  being 
that  of  an  agent,  or  force,  which  acts  from  itself,  uncaused, 
initiating  trains  of  effect  that  flow  from  itself. 

Of  the  two  great  classes,  therefore,  named  in  our  distri- 
bution, one  comprehends  all  beings  that  are  able  to  origin- 
ate new  trains  of  effects, — these  are  the  Powers ;  and  the 
other  is  made  up  of  such  as  can  only  propagate  effects  un- 
der certain  fixed  laws, — these  are  Things.  At  the  head 
of  one  class  we  conceive  is  God,  as  Lord  of  Hosts ;  who, 
in  virtue  of  his  all-originating  power  as  Creator,  is  called 
the  First  Cause ;  having  round  him  innumerable  orders  of 
intelligence  which,  though  caused  to  exist  by  Him,  are  as 
truly  first  causes  in  their  action  as  He, — starting  all  their 
trains  of  consequences  in  the  same  manner.  In  the  other 
class,  we  have  the  immense  catalogue  of  what  are  called 
the  natural  sciences, — the  astronomical  bodies,  the  imma- 
terial forces,  the  fluids  and  solids  of  the  world,  the  ele- 
ments and  atoms  of  chemistry,  the  dynamics  of  life  and 
instinct, — in  all  of  which,  what  are  called  causes  are  only 
propagations  of  effects  under  and  by  fixed  laws.  Hence 
they  are  second  causes  only ;  that  is,  causes  whose  causa- 
tions are  determined  by  others  back  of  them ;  never,  in 
any  sense,  originative,  or  first  causes.  The  completeness 
of  the  distribution  will  be  yet  more  clear,  and  the  im- 
mense abyss  of  distance  between  the  two  orders,  or 


86  POWERS    ABE 

classes,  more  visibly  impassable,  if  we  add  such  points  of 
contrast  as  the  following:— 

Powers,  acting  in  liberty,  are  capable  of  a  double 
action, — to  do,  or  not  to  do,  (God,  for  example,  in  creat- 
ing, man  in  sinning;)  things  can  act  only  in  one  way, 
viz.,  as  their  law  determines. 

Powers  are  perfectible  only  by  exercise,  after  they  are 
made ;  things  are  perfect  as  made. 

Powers  are  perfected,  or  established  in  their  law,  only 
by  a  schooling  of  their  consent ;  things  are  under  a  law 
mechanical  at  the  first,  having  no  consent. 

Powers  can  violate  the  present  or  nearest  harmony, 
moving  disorder  in  it;  things  are  incapable  of  disorder, 
save  as  they  are  disordered  by  the  malign  action  of 
powers. 

Powers,  governed  by  the  absolute  force  or  fiat  of  omni- 
potence, would  in  that  fact  be  uncreated  and  cease ;  things 
exist  and  act  only  in  and  by  the  impulsion  of  that  fiat. 

We  have  thus  drawn  out  and  set  before  us  two  distinct 
orders  and  degrees  of  being,  which,  together,  constitute 
the  real  universe.  So  perfectly  diverse  are  they  in  kind, 
that  no  common  terms  of  law  or  principle  can,  for  one 
moment,  be  imagined  to  include  them  both ;  they  can  be 
one  system  only  in  some  higher  and  broader  sense,  which 
subordinates  one  to  the  other,  or  both  to  the  same  final 
causes.  One  thing  is  thus  made  clear ;  viz.,  that  nature  is 
not,  in  any  proper  sense,  the  universe.  We  know  that  it 
is  not,  because  we  find  another  kind  of  existence  in  our- 
selves, which  consciously  does  not  fall  within  the  terms  of 
nature.  Probably  the  disciples  of  naturalism  will  make 
answer  to  this  course  of  argument,  by  complaining  that 
we  gain  our  point  thus  easily  by  means  of  our  definition, 


THE    PRINCIPAL    MAGNITUDES.  87 

which  definition  is  arbitrary, — drawing  a  distinction  be- 
tween nature  and  the  supernatural,  or  between  things  and 
powers,  that  is  not  usual.  Whether  it  be  usual  or  not  is 
not  the  question,  but  whether  it  is  grounded  in  reality  and 
witnessed  immediately  by  our  own  consciousness.  If  it 
has  been  the  prime  sophism  of  the  naturalists,  to  assume 
the  universality  of  nature,  and  still  more  if  they  have 
carried  the  assumption  so  far  as  to  hold,  in  fact  and  even 
formally,  that  men  are  only  things, — under  the  same  laws 
of  eternal  necessity  with  things,  and  equally  incapable  of 
obligation,  thus  a  part  of  the  system  of  universal  nature, — 
we  certainly  have  as  good  a  right  to  raise  definitions,  that 
meet  the  truth  of  consciousness,  as  they  to  overlook  and 
hide  them,  in  plain  defiance  of  consciousness.  There  may 
be  something  fatal  in  such  definitions,  but  there  certainly 
is  nothing  arbitrary. 

Receiving  it  now  as  a  truth  sufficiently  established  that 
nature,  or  the  realm  of  things,  is  not  the  system  of  the 
universe,  that  there  is  beside  a  realm  of  powers,  it  is  dif- 
ficult to  close  the  survey  taken,  without  glancing,  for  a 
moment,  at  the  relative  weight  and  consequence  of  the 
two  realms.  When  such  a  question  is  raised,  there  are 
many  who  will  have  it  as  their  feeling,  whether  they  say 
it  in  words  or  not,  that  the  world  of  things  preponderates 
in  magnitude ;  for  what  are  we  doing,  a  great  part  of  us, 
whether  men  of  action  or  men  of  science,  but  chasing  the 
shows  of  our  senses,  and  magnifying  their  import,  by  the 
stimulation  of  our  egregious  idolatry  ?  And  yet  it  would 
seem  that  any  most  extempore  glance  at  the  world  of 
powers  would  suffice  to  correct  us,  and  set  the  realm  of 
things,  vast  as  it  is,  in  a  very  humble  place.  First,  we 
recognize  in  the  grand  inventory  our  own  human  race. 


88  NATUBE    ONLY    A    FIELD 

We  call  them  persons,  spirits,  souls,  minds,  intelligences, 
iree  agents,  and  we  see  them  moving  out  from  nature  and 
above  it,  consciously  superior;  streaming  into  it  in  cur- 
rents of  causality  from  themselves ;  subduing  it,  develop- 
ing or  detecting  its  secret  laws,  harnessing  its  forces,  and 
using  it  as  the  pliant  instrument  of  their  will ;  first  causes 
all,  in  a  sense,  and  springs  of  action,  side  by  side  with  the 
Creator,  whose  miniatures  they  are,  whose  footsteps  they 
distinguish,  and  whose  recognition  they  naturally  aspire 
to.  Next  adjacent  to  these  we  have  the  intelligent  powers 
of  the  astronomic  worlds,  and  all  the  outlying  populations 
of  the  sky ;  so  numerous  that  we  shall  best  conceive  their 
number,  not  by  counting  the  stars  and  increasing  the 
census  obtained  by  some  factor  or  multiplier  greater  than 
the  mind  can  definitely  grasp,  but  by  imagining  the  stellar 
spaces  of  infinity  itself  interfused  and  filled  with  their 
prodigious  tides  of  life  and  motion.  All  these,  like  us, 
are  creatures  of  admiration,  science,  will,  and  duty ;  able 
to  search  out  the  invisible  in  the  visible,  and  find  the  foot- 
steps of  God  in  his  works.  Then  again,  also,  we  recog- 
nize a  vast  and  gloriously  populated  realm  of  angels  and 
departed  spirits,  who,  when  they  are  sent,  minister,  unseen, 
about  us ;  mixed,  we  know  not  how,  in  the  surroundings 
of  our  state,  with  unsaintly  and  demoniacal  powers  of 
mischief,  not  sent  nor  suffered  even  to  come,  save  when 
they  are  attracted  by  the  low  affinities  we  offer  as  open 
gates  to  their  coming.  To  which,  also,  we  are  to  add 
those  unknown,  dimly-imagined  orders  of  intelligences,  of 
which  we  are  notified  in  the  terms  of  revelation, — seraphim, 
living  creatures,  thrones,  authorities,  dominions,  princi- 
palities, and  powers. 

Now  all  these  living  armies  or  hosts  of  God,  and  God 


the  Lord  of  Hosts,  capable  of  character,  society,  duty, 
love, — creators  all,  in  a  sense,  of  things  that  otherwise 
could  never  be,  first  causes  all  of  their  own  acts  and 
doings,  able  to  adorn  what  is  and  contrive  what  is  not, 
and  carry  up  the  worlds  themselves  in  ascending  scales  of 
improvement, — can  we  look  on  these  and  imagine  that 
nature  includes  the  principal  sum  and  constitutes  the  real 
system  of  being  ?  Are  not  these  other  forms  of  being  the 
transcendent  forms,  and  if  we  will  inventory  the  universe, 
are  they  not  all,  in  fact,  that  gives  it  an  assignable  value  ? 
If  God  Himself  be  a  real  existence,  what  is  he,  by  the 
supposition,  but  the  major  term  of  all  existence, — the  all- 
containing  substance,  a  being  so  great  that  we  scarcely 
need  refer  to  the  free  populations  just  named,  to  sink  all 
that  is  below  Him,  and  is  called  nature,  into  comparative 
insignificance.  But,  when  we  regard  Him  as  the  Uncre- 
ated Power  at  the  head  of  his  immense  family  of  powers, 
all  systematized  or  sought  to  be  systematized,  all  perfect 
in  good  or  else  to  be  perfected  under  one  law,  viz.,  the 
eternal,  necessary,  immutable  law  of  right, — a  law  which 
he  first  of  all  accepts  himself,  in  which  his  own  character 
of  beauty  and  truth  and  even  his  felicity  is  based,  and 
which  therefore  he  ordains  for  all,  to  be  the  condition  of 
their  character,  as  of  his  own,  building  nature  itself  to  it, 
as  a  field  of  exercise  and  trial ;  then  do  we,  for  once,  catch 
a  true  glimpse  of  the  significance  of  nature.  It  is  no 
more  that  universe  the  philosophers  speak  of;  it  is  raised 
in  dignity  by  the  relation  it  fills,  and,  for  a  like  reason, 
sunk  in  quantity  to  comparative  nothingness.  Its  dis- 
tances no  longer  occupy  us,  its  magnitudes  appall  us  no 
more,  the  astronomic  splendors  are  tinsel ;  nothing  is  solid, 
or  great,  or  high,  but  those  transcendent  powers  whose 

8* 


90  AND    THEIR    EXERCISE. 

eternities  are  the  main  substances  of  the  worlds.  Nature, 
in  short,  is  only  stage,  field,  medium,  vehicle,  for  the  uni- 
verse; that  is,  for  Grod  and  his  powers.  These  are  the 
real  magnitudes ;  because  they  contain,  at  once,  the  import 
and  the  final  causes,  or  last  ends,  of  all  created  substance. 
The  grand,  universal,  invisible  system  of  God,  therefore, 
is  a  system  that  centralizes  itself  in  these,  subordinating 
all  mere  things,  and  having  them  for  its  instruments.  For 
the  serving  and  training  of  these,  he  loosens  the  bands  of 
Orion  and  tempers  the  sweet  influences  of  Pleiades ;  spread- 
ing out  the  heavens  themselves,  not  for  the  heavens' 
sakes,  but  as  a  tent  for  these  to  dwell  in.  Is  it  any  thing 
new  that  the  tent  is  a  thing  less  solid  and  of  meaner  con- 
sequence than  the  occupant? 


CHAPTER  IV. 

PROBLEM  OF  EXISTENCE,  AS  BELATED  TO  THE  FACT  OF 

EVIL. 

WE  have  reached  a  summit  now,  where  a  wider  pros- 
pect opens,  and  God's  true  system  begins  to  reveal  its  out- 
lines. Nature,  intelligently  defined,  is  not,  as  we  have 
seen,  that  system,  but  only  a  subordinate  and  humble 
member  of  it.  The  principal  existences  are  not  the  things 
or  magnitudes  which  science  has  for  its  subjects,  but  those 
everlasting  populations  of  powers  that  inhabit  the  realm 
of  things  and  do  their  will  upon  it.  The  real  universe 
invests,  or  takes  in  nature,  even  as  the  blooming  and  suc- 
culent peach  gathers  its  fruity  parts,  its  fibers,  veins  and 
circulating  juices,  about  the  nut  or  stone.  Scientifically 
speaking,  both  parts  together  constitute  the  real  unity  of 
the  peach.  But,  if  any  one  should  claim  this  distinction 
for  the  stone,  because  of  its  stability  and  because  it  is  a 
point  of  inherence  and  a  basis  of  reaction  for  the  vascular 
and  fleshy  parts,  it  would  be  a  good  and  sufficient  reply 
that,  practically,  or  as  regarding  considerations  of  value, 
the  fruity  part  is  all;  and  that,  when  we  name  the  peach, 
we  commonly  do  not  so  much  as  think  of  the  stone,  either 
as  being  or  not  being  included.  So  it  is  with  cause  and 
effect,  laws  and  instincts,  all  that  we  call  nature ;  it  is  not 
the  system  of  God,  and  is  really  no  co-ordinate  part  of  his 
universe,  considered  as  related  to  the  powers  that  have 
their  society  in  it  and  get  their  reactions  from  it.  They 
are  the  universe,  practically,  themselves;  only  having  na- 
ture as  their  field  and  the  tool-house  of  their  instrument' 
ations. 


92  POWERS    NOT    MANAGEABLE 

Regarding  them  now  as  powers,  and  so  as  the  grand 
reality  of  God's  universal  system,  let  us  consider  more 
carefully  what  their  relations  are  to  the  natural  forces  and 
the  general  order  of  the  system.  They  can  not,  by  the 
supposition,  be  operated  under  laws  of  causation,  or  be,  in 
any  sense,  included  in  the  order  of  nature.  As  little 
admissible  is  it,  supposing  the  strict  originality  of  their 
actions,  and  regarding  them  as  properly  first  causes  each 
of  his  own,  that  they  are  subject  to  any  direct  control,  or 
impulsion  of  omnipotence.  We  set  no  limits,  when  we 
thus  speak,  to  omnipotence ;  we  only  say  that  omnipotence 
is  force,  and  that  nothing  in  the  nature  of  force  is  appli- 
cable to  the  immediate  direction,  or  determination  of  pow- 
ers. At  a  remove  one  or  more  degrees  distant,  force  may 
concern  itself  in  the  adjustment  of  means,  influences^  and 
motivities  related  to  choice ;  or,  by  spiritual  permeations, 
it  may  temper  and  sway  that  side  of  the  soul  which  is 
under  the  control  of  laws,  and  so  may  raise  motivities  of 
thought  and  feeling  within  the  soul  itself;  but  the  will, 
the  man  himself  as  a  power,  is  manageable  only  in  a 
moral  way ;  that  is,  by  authority,  truth,  justice,  beauty, 
that  which  supposes  obligation  or  command.  And  this, 
again,  supposes  a  consenting  obedience,  and  this  a  power 
of  non-consent,  without  which  the  consent  were  insignifi- 
cant. Which  power  of  non-consent,  it  will  be  observed,  is 
a  power  also  of  deviation  or  disobedience,  and  no  one  can 
show  beforehand  that,  having  such  a  power,  the  subject 
will  not  sometime  use  it. 

So  far  the  possibility  of  evil  appears  to  be  necessarily 
involved  in  the  existence  of  a  realm  of  powers ;  whether 
it  shall  also  be  a  fact,  depends  on  other  considerations  yet 
to  be  named.  One  of  the  most  valued  and  most  triumph 


BY    OMNIPOTENCE.  93 

antly  asserted  arguments  of  our  new  school  of  Sophists  is 
dismissed,  in  this  manner,  at  the  outset.  God  they  say  is 
omnipotent,  and,  being  omnipotent,  he  can,  of  course,  do 
all  things.  If  therefore  he  chooses  to  have  no  sin  or 
disobedience,  there  will  be  no  sin  or  disobedience ;  and  if 
we  fall  on  what  is  sin  to  us,  it  will  only  be  a  form  of  good 
to  Him,  and  would  be  also  to  us,  if  we  could  see  far 
enough  to  comprehend  the  good.  The  argument  is  well 
enough,  in  case  men  are  things  only  and  not  powers ;  but 
if  God  made  them  to  be  powers,  they  are,  by  the  supposi- 
tion, to  act  as  being  uncaused  in  their  action,  which  ex- 
cludes any  control  of  them  by  God's  omnipotent  force, 
and  then  what  becomes  of  the  argument  ?  Omnipotence 
may  be  exerted,  as  we  just  said,  one  degree  farther  off,  or 
in  that  department  of  the  soul  which  is  under  conditions 
of  nature;  but  it  does  not  follow  that  any  changes  of  view, 
feeling,  motive,  wrought  in  this  manner,  will  certainly 
suffice  to  keep  any  being  in  the  right,  when  he  is  so  far  a 
power  that  he  oan  even  choose  the  weakest  and  most 
worthless  motive — as  we  consciously  do  in  every  wrong 
act  of  our  lives. 

We  dismiss,  in  the  same  short  manner,  the  sweeping 
inferences  a  certain  crude-minded  class  of  theologians  are 
accustomed  to  draw  from  the  omnipotence  of  God.  They 
take  the  word  omnipotence  in  the  same  undiscerning  and 
coarse  way;  as  if  it  followed  indubitably,  that  a  being 
omnipotent  can  do  every  thing  he  really  wishes  to  have 
done ;  and  then  the  conclusion  is  not  far  off  that  God,  for 
some  inscrutable  reason,  wants  sin,  wants  misery — else 
why  do  they  exist  ? — therefore  that  the  existence  of  sin 
and  misery  supposes  no  real  breach  of  order,  and  that, 
when  they  come,  they  fall  into  the  regular  train  of  God's 


94  WHICH    IS    YET    NO    LIMITATION 

ideal  harmony,  as  exactly  as  any  of  the  heavenly  motions, 
or  chemical  attractions.  All  such  idolaters  of  the  force- 
principle  in  God  will,  of  course,  be  abundantly  shocked 
by  what  appears  to  be  a  limit  on  the  sway,  or  sufficiency  of 
their  idol.  And  yet,  even  they  will  be  advancing  un- 
consciously, every  day  of  their  lives,  something  which 
implies  a  limitation  as  real  as  any  they  complain  of.  Thus, 
how  often  will  they  say,  without  suspecting  any  such 
implication,  that  God  could  not  forgive  sin  without  a  ran- 
som, and  could  not  provide  a  ransom,  save  by  the  incar- 
nate life  and  death  of  his  Son.  Why  not,  if  he  is  omnip- 
otent ?  Can  not  omnipotence  do  every  thing  ?  This  very 
question,  indeed,  of  the  seeming  limitation  of  God's 
omnipotence,  implied  in  the  sacrifice  of  Christ,  was  the 
precise  difficulty  which  Anselm,  in  his  famous  treatise, 
undertook  to  solve.  He  states  it  thus: — "To  show  for 
what  necessity  and  cause  God,  who  is  omnipotent,  should 
have  assumed  the  littleness  and  weakness  of  human  na- 
ture, for  the  sake  of  its  renewal;"*  or,  as  he  had  just 
been  saying,!  how  he  did  this  to  restore  the  world,  when, 
for  aught  that  appears,  "he  might  have  done  it  merely  by 
his  will." 

The  difficulty  was  real,  no  doubt,  to  a  certain  class  of 
minds,  in  his  time ;  but  to  another  class,  inthralled  by  no 
such  crudities  in  respect  to  force,  it  never  was,  or  could  be, 
any  difficulty  at  all.  As  little  room  for  question  is  there 
in  our  doctrine,  when  we  say  that  a  realm  of  powers  is 
not,  by  the  supposition,  to  be  governed  as  a  realm  of 
things,  that  is,  by  direct  omnipotence;  for  we  mean  by 
omnipotence,  not  power,  in  the  sense  of  influence,  or 
moral  impression,  but  mere  executive  force ;  we  mean  that 

*  Bibliotheca  Sacra,  Vol.  XI,  p.  737.        fib.,  p.  736. 


OF    OMNIPOTENCE.  95 

God,  as  being  omnipotent,  is  in  force  to  do  all  that  force 
can  do — this  and  nothing  more.  But  force  has  no  rela- 
tion to  the  doing  of  many  things.  It  can  overturn  mount- 
ains, roll  back  the  sea,  or  open  a  way  through  it;  but 
manifestly  it  has  nothing  to  do  in  the  direct  impulsion  of 
a  soul ;  for  a  soul  is  a  power,  capable  of  character  and 
responsibility,  as  being  clear  of  all  causation  and  acting  by 
its  own  free  self-impulsion.  Therefore,  to  say  that  pow- 
ers, or  free  agents,  can  not  be  swayed  absolutely  by 
omnipotent  force,  is  only  to  deny  the  applicability  of 
such  force,  not  to  place  it  under  limitation.  It  might  as 
well  be  called  a  limitation  of  the  force  of  an  army,  to  say 
that  it  can  not  compute  an  eclipse,  or  write  an  epic;  or  that 
of  an  earthquake,  to  say  that  it  can  not  shake  a  demonstra- 
tion of  Euclid. 

The  doctrine  I  am  stating  involves,  in  fact,  no  limita- 
tion of  the  power  of  God  at  all.  It  only  shows  that  the 
reason  of  God's  empire  excludes,  at  a  certain  point,  the 
absolute  dominion  of  force.  Nor  is  it  any  thing  new, 
more  than  in  the  question  of  Anselm  above  referred  to, 
that  the  force  of  God  consents  to  the  sovereignty  of  his 
eternal  reason,  and  the  counsel  of  wisdom  in  his  purposes. 

But  it  will  be  peremptorily  required  of  us,  at  this  point, 
to  answer  another  question ;  viz.,  why  God  should  have 
created  a  realm  of  powers,  or  free  agents,  if  they  must 
needs  be  capable,  in  this  manner,  of  wrong  and  misery  ? 
Without  acknowledging,  for  one  moment,  that  I  am  re- 
sponsible for  the  answer  of  any  such  question,  and  deny- 
ing explicitly  the  right  of  any  mortal  to  disallow  or  dis- 
credit any  act  of  God,  because  he  can  not  comprehend  the 
reasons  of  it,  I  will  simply  say,  in  reply,  that  it  is  enough 
for  me  to  be  allowed  the  simple  hypothesis  that  God 


96  IN    A    KINGDOM    OF    POWERS, 

preferred  to  have  powers  and  not  things  only ;  because  he 
loves  character  and,  apart  from  this,  cares  not  for  all  the 
mere  things  that  can  be  piled  in  the  infinitude  of  space 
itself,  even  though  they  be  diamonds ;  because,  in  bestow- 
ing on  a  creature  the  perilous  capacity  of  character,  he 
bestows  the  highest  possibility  of  wealth  and  glory;  a 
capacity  to  know,  to  love,  to  enjoy,  to  be  consciously  great 
and  blessed  in  the  participation  of  his  own  divinity  and 
character.  For  if  all  the  orbs  of  heaven  were  so  many 
solid  Kohinoors,  glittering  eternally  in  the  sun,  what  were 
they,  either  to  themselves  or  to  Him ;  or,  if  they  should 
roll  eternally,  undisturbed  in  the  balance  of  their  attrac- 
tions, what  were  they  to  each  other  ?  Is  it  any  impeach- 
ment of  God  that  he  did  not  care  to  reign  over  an  empire 
of  stones  ?  If  he  has  deliberately  chosen  a  kind  of  em- 
pire not  to  be  ruled  by  force,  if  he  has  deliberately  set  his 
children  beyond  that  kind  of  control,  that  they  may  be 
governed  by  truth,  reason,  love,  want,  fear,  and  the  like, 
acting  through  their  consent ;  if  we  find  them  able  to  act 
even  against  the  will  of  God,  as  stones  and  vegetables  can 
not,  what  more  is  necessary  to  vindicate  his  goodness,  than 
to  suggest  that  he  has  given  them/possibly,  a  capacity  to 
break  allegiance,  in  order  that  there  may  be  a  meaning 
and  a  glory  in  allegiance,  when  they  choose  it  ? 

There  is,  then,  such  a  thing  inherent  in  the  system  of 
powers  as  a  possibility  of  wrong ;  for,  given  the  possibility 
of  right,  we  have  the  possibility  of  wrong.  And  it  may, 
for  aught  that  appears,  be  the  very  plan  itself  of  God,  to 
establish  his  powers  in  the  right,  by  allowing  them  an  ex- 
periment of  the  wrong,  in  which  to  school  their  liberty ; 
bringing  them  up  again  out  of  its  bitterness,  by  a  deliver- 


EVIL    INHERENTLY    POSSIBLE.  97 

ing  process,  to  shun  it  with  an  intelligent  and  forever  fixed 
abhorrence  afterward.  And  then,  if  this  should  be  his 
plan,  what  an  immense  complication  of  acts,  events,  pro- 
cesses, contrarieties,  and  caprices,  must  be  involved  in  it. 
Nature,  considered  as  the  mere  run  of  cause  and  effect,  is 
simple  as  a  jewsharp.  But  here  we  have  a  grand  concilium, 
or  republic  of  wills,  acting  each  For  himself,  and  in  that 
capacity  to  be  trained,  governed,  turned  about  and  about, 
and  finally  brought  up  into  the  harmony  of  a  consenting 
choice  and  a  common  love  and  character.  The  system 
will  be  one  that  systematizes  the  caprices  and  discords  of 
innumerable  wills,  and  works  results  of  order,  through 
endless  complications  of  disorder ;  having,  in  this  fact,  its 
real  wisdom  and  magnificence.  Thus  how  meager  an 
affair  to  thought  were  our  American  republic,  if  it  were 
nothing  but  the  run  of  causes  in  the  climate  and  soil,  and 
the  mere  physiology  of  the  men ;  but,  when  it  is  consid- 
ered as  containing  so  many  wills,  acting  all  from  them- 
selves, incomputable  in  their  action  because  they  are  un- 
caused in  it ;  reducing  so  many  mixtures  of  contrarieties 
and  discords  to  a  beautiful  resultant  order  and  social  unity ; 
striving  still  on,  by  the  force  of  its  organic  nisus,  toward  a 
condition  of  historic  greatness  hitherto  unknown  to  the 
world — considered  thus,  how  truly  sublime  and  wonderful 
a  creation  does  it  appear  to  be.  And  yet  there  are  many 
who  can  not  imagine  that  God  has  any  system  or  law,  in 
his  great  republic  of  freedom,  if  there  be  any  discord,  any 
contrariety,  any  infringement  of  his  mandates,  any  dis- 
turbance of  nature ;  or  indeed  if  he  does  not  really  impel 
and  do  every  thing  himself,  by  his  own  immediate  and 
absolute  causation.  "Whereas,  if  they  could  rise  above  the 
feeble  conceit  by  which  they  make  the  force  of  God  their 

9 


98  THE    PROBLEM    OF    EXISTENCE 

idol,  they  would  see  that,  possibly,  it  may  be  the  highest 
point  of  grandeur  in  his  system,  that  it  systematizes 
powers  transcending  nature,  and  even  disorders  in  the  field 
of  nature  itself. 

Or,  if  it  be  objected  that  the  admission  or  fact  of  such 
disorders  annihilates  the  unity  of  God's  empire,  leaving  it 
in  a  fragmentary,  cloven  state,  which  excludes  the  scien- 
tific idea  of  a  proper  universe,  it  is  a  good  and  sufficient 
answer  that  God's  unities  are  all,  in  the  last  degree,  unities 
of  end,  or  counsel  as  related  to  end ;  consisting  never  in  a 
perfect  concert  of  parts,  or  elements,  but  in  a  comprehens- 
ive order  that  takes  up  and  tempers  to  its  own  purposes 
many  antagonisms.  What,  in  fact,  is  the  order  of  heaven, 
or  even  the  atomic  order  of  particles,  but  a  resultant  of  the 
eternal  strife  by  which  they  are  instigated  ?  What  then 
if  the  powers  are  able  to  break  loose,  and  do,  from  obliga- 
tion; when  the  system  or  plan  of  God  is  made  large 
enough  to  include  such  a  breaking  loose,  and  deep  enough 
in  counsel,  from  the  beginning,  to  handle  it  in  terms  of 
sovereign  order.  The  higher  unity  is  not  gone  because 
discord  has  come  in  points  below,  and  would  not  be,  even 
if  the  discord  were  eternal.  Still  it  remains,  comprehends 
every  thing,  moving  still  on  its  ends,  as  little  diverted  or 
disturbed,  as  if  the  powers  all  came  to  wed  themselves  to 
it  in  loving  obedience.  There  is  a  real  universe  now  as 
before,  because  the  universal  nisus  of  the  plan  remains, 
and  because  the  regulative  order  that  comprehends  so 
great  irregularity  retains  its  integrity  unbroken,  its  equi- 
librium undisturbed. 

If  now  we  raise  the  question  more  distinctly,  what  is 
the  great  problem  of  existence,  as  regards  the  order  of 


A  TRAINING  INTO  PERFECTION.      99 

powers,  or  the  human  race  as  being  such,  it  is  not  difficult 
to  answer,  following  out  the  view  thus  far  presented,  that 
it  is  our  perfection ;  the  perfection,  that  is,  of  our  liberty, 
the  schooling  of  our  choice,  or  consent,  as  powers,  so  that 
we  may  be  fully  established  in  harmony  with  God's  will 
and  character ;  unified  with  Him  in  his  will,  glorified  with 
Him  in  the  glory  of  his  character,  and  so  perfected  with 
Him  in  his  eternal  beatitude.  Persons  or  powers  are  crea- 
tures, we  have  seen,  who  act,  not  by  causality,  but  by 
consent;  they  must,  therefore,  be  set  in  conditions  that 
invite  consent,  and  treated  also  in  a  manner  that  permits 
the  caprices  of  liberty.  It  is  also  a  remarkable  distinction, 
we  have  noted,  that  they  are  creatures  perfectible  only 
after  they  are  made,  while  mere  natural  quantities  and 
objects  are  perfect  as  made.  Just  here,  accordingly,  the 
grand  problem  of  their  life  and  of  the  world  begins. 
They  are  to  be  trained,  formed,  furnished,  perfected ;  and 
to  this  end  are  to  be  carried  through  just  such  scenes,  ex- 
periences, changes,  trials,  variations,  operations,  as  will 
best  serve  their  spiritual  perfection  and  their  final  fruition 
of  each  other  and  of  God.  If  there  are  necessary  perils 
in  such  a  trial  of  their  liberty,  then  they  are  to  be  set  upon 
the  course  of  such  perils.  Nor  will  it  make  any  difference 
if  the  perils  are  such  as  breed  the  greatest  speculative  dif- 
ficulties. God  does  not  frame  his  empire  to  suit  and  sat- 
isfy our  speculations,  but  for  our  practical  profit ;  to  bring 
us  up  into  His  own  excellence,  and  establish  us  eternally 
in  the  participation  of  his  character.  On  this  subject  there 
would  seem  to  be  very  little  room  for  doubt.  The  scrip- 
ture revelation  proposes  this  view  of  life,  our  own  observ- 
ation confirms  it,  and  besides  there  is  really  no  other  in 
which  even  our  philosophy  can  comfortably  rest. 


100         WHICH    TRAINING,    AS    BEING    FOR, 

But  this  training  of  consent,  this  perfecting  of  liberty 
in  the  issues  of  character,  it  will  help  us  at  this  early 
point  to  observe,  is  nothing  different  from  a  preparation 
for  society  and  a  drill-practice  in  the  principles  of  society ; 
that  is,  in  truth,  in  purity,  in  justice,  in  patience,  forgive- 
ness, love,  all  the  self-renouncing  and  beneficent  virtues. 
Accordingly  the  course  of  training  will  itself  be  social ;  a 
trial  under,  in,  and  by  society.  The  powers  will  be 
thrown  together  in  terms  of  duty  as  being  terms  of  society, 
and  in  terms  of  society  as  being  terms  of  duty.  Morality 
and  the  law  of  religion  respect  society  and  the  condition 
of  social  well-being,  which  is  the  grand  felicity  of  powers. 
Things  have  no  society,  or  capacity  of  social  relations.  In 
mere  nature,  considered  as  a  scheme  of  cause  and  effect, 
there  is  nothing  social,  any  more  than  there  is  in  the  mem- 
bers of  a  steam-engine.  And  if  we  really  believe  that  we 
ourselves  are  only  wheels,  in  the  play  of  an  all-compre- 
hending causation,  it  should  be  the  end  even  of  the  feeling 
of  society  in  us.  Love,  benefit,  sympathy,  injury,  hatred, 
thanks,  blame,  character,  worship,  faith, — all  that  consti- 
tutes the  reality  of  society,  whether  of  men  with  God  or 
of  men  with  each  other,  belongs  to  the  fact  that  we  are 
consciously  powers.  Strip  us  of  this,  let  all  these  fruits 
be  regarded  as  mere  dynamic  results,  under  the  head  of 
natural  philosophy,  and  they  will  change,  at  once,  to  be 
mere  tricks,  or  impostures  of  natural  magic.  Our  disci- 
pline, therefore,  is  to  be  such  as  our  supernatural  and 
social  quality  requires,  the  discipline  of  society.  Since  it 
is  for  society,  it  must  be  in  and  by  society.  We  accord- 
ingly shall  have  a  training  as  powers  among  other  powers, 
such  as  will  qualify  us  for  a  place  of  eternal  unity  and 
harmony  with  them  under  God,  the  central  and  First 


MUST    BE    IN,    SOCIETY.  101 

Power ;  so  to  be  set  by  Him  in  a  consolidated,  everlasting 
kingdom  of  righteousness,  and  truth,  and  love,  and  peace. 
And  thus  it  is  that  we  find  ourselves  embodied  in  matter, 
to  act  as  powers  upon,  for,  with,  and,  if  we  will,  against 
each  other,  in  all  the  endless  complications  of  look,  word, 
act,  art,  force,  and  persuasion;  in  the  family  and  in  the 
state,  or  two  and  two  upon  each  other ;  in  marriage,  frater- 
nity, neighborhood,  friendship,  trade,  association,  protec- 
tion, hospitality,  instruction,  sympathy;  or,  if  we  will,  in 
frauds,  enmities,  oppressions,  cruelties,  and  mutual  tempta- 
tions,— great  men  moving  the  age  they  live  in  by  their 
eloquence ;  or  shaping  the  ages  to  come  by  their  institu- 
tions ;  or  corrupting  the  world's  moral  atmosphere  by  their 
bad  thoughts,  their  fashions  and  vices;  or  tearing  and  des- 
olating all  things  by  irruptions  of  war,  to  win  a  throne  of 
empire,  or  the  honors  of  victors  and  heroes.  By  all  these 
methods  do  we  come  into  society,  and  begin  to  act,  each 
one,  upon  the  trains  of  cause  and  eifect  in  nature;  thus 
upon  each  other,  from  our  own  point  of  liberty.  And  ac- 
cordingly society  is,  in  all  its  vast  complications,  an  ap- 
pointment— we  can  not  escape  it.  "We  can  only  say  what 
kind  of  experience  it  shall  be  as  regards  the  fruits  of  char- 
acter in  us.  Meantime  God  is  reigning  over  it,  socially 
related  Himself  to  each  member,  governing  and  training 
that  member  through  his  own  liberty.  Life,  thus  ordered, 
is  a  magnificent  scheme  to  bring  out  the  value  of  law  and 
teach  the  necessity  of  right  as  the  only  conservating  prin- 
ciple of  order  and  happiness;  teaching  the  more  power- 
fully that  it  teaches,  if  so  it  must,  by  disorder  and  sorrow. 
And  nature,  it  will  be  observed,  is  the  universal  medium 
by  or  through  which  the  training  is  accomplished.  The 
powers  act  on  each  other,  by  acting  on  the  lines  of  cause 

9* 


102  AND    SOCIETY    IS    CARRIED    ON 

and  effect  in  nature;  starting  thus  new  trains  of  events 
and  consequences,  by  which  they  affect  each  other,  in  ways 
of  injury  or  blessing.  They  speak  and  set  the  air  in  mo- 
tion, as  it  otherwise  would  not  move;  and  so  the  obedient 
air,  played  on  by  their  sovereignty,  becomes  the  vehicle 
of  words  that  communicate  innumerable  stings,  insults, 
flatteries,  seductions,  threats;  or  tones  of  comfort,  love 
and  blessing.  So  of  all  the  other  elements,  solid,  fluid,  or 
aerial— they  are  medial  as  between  the  powers.  The 
whole  play  of  commerce  in  society  is  through  nature,  and 
is  in  fact  a  playing  on  the  causes  and  objects  of  nature  by 
supernatural  agents.  All  doings  and  misdoings  are,  in 
this  view,  a  kind  of  discourse  in  the  terms  of  nature,  by 
which  these  supernatural  agents,  viz.,  men,  answer  to  each 
other,  or  to  God,  in  society.  Their  blasphemies  and  pray- 
ers and  songs  and  threats,  their  looks  and  gestures,  their 
dress  and  manners,  their  injuries  and  alms,  their  blows  and 
barricades  and  bullets  and  bombs,  these  and  such  like  are 
society,  the  grand  conversation  by  which  our  social  disci- 
pline is  carried  on.  And  it  is  all  a  supernatural  transaction. 
As  a  conversation  in  words  is  not  reducible  to  mere  natural 
causation,  no  more  is  that  conversation  in  bullets  and  bombs 
that  we  call  a  battle.  Nature  could  as  well  talk,  as  com- 
pound her  forces  in  cartridges  and  fire  them  with  a  lev 
eled  aim.  Her  activity  in  all  these  exchanges,  or  ine 
dial  transactions,  that  are  carried  on  so  briskly,  is  only  the 
activity  of  the  powers  through  her,  and  is,  in  fact,  super 
natural.  They  start  all  these  nimble  couriers  and  set  them 
flying  back  and  forth,  by  the  right  they  have  to  come 
down  upon  nature  and  act  themselves  into  it.  To  a  cer- 
tain extent,  they  are  inserted  into  nature  and  conditioned 
by  it.  They  live  in  nature  and  are  of  it,  up  to  the  point  of 


THROUGH    NATURE.  103 

their  will,  but  there  they  emerge  into  qualified  sovereignty. 
Without  this  inherence  in  nature  they  would  have  no  me- 
dia of  action,  no  common  terms  of  order,  interest,  or  trial, 
and  no  such  basis  of  reaction  as  would  make  the  conse- 
quences of  their  action  ascertainable,  or  intelligible ;  with- 
out this  sovereignty  they  would  not  be  responsible.  Hence 
God's  way  has  been,  in  all  ages,  and  doubtless  in  all  worlds, 
to  set  his  supernatural  agents  in  the  closest  connection  with 
nature,  there  to  have  their  action  and  there  to  perceive  its 
effects  on  themselves  and  others.  Even  the  miracles  of  Je- 
sus are  set  as  deep  in  nature  as  possible ;  showing  the  wine 
of  Cana  to  be  made  out  of  water,  and  not  out  of  nothing; 
the  multitude  of  the  loaves  out  of  seven,  not  out  of  none ; 
that  so  the  mind,  being  fastened  to  something  already  ex- 
istent, may  see  the  miracle  as  a  process;  whereas,  without 
a  something  in  nature  to  begin  with,  there  could  be  no 
process,  and  therefore  nothing  to  observe. 

How  far  this  range  of  society  extends,  whether  nature 
is  not,  by  some  inherent  necessity,  a  medium  open  to  the 
commerce  of  all  the  powers  of  all  worlds,  involving,  in 
that  manner,  a  perilous  exposure  to  demoniacal  irruptions, 
till  moral  defenses  and  safeguards  are  prepared  against 
them,  are  questions  not  to  be  answered  here ;  but  we  shall 
recur  to  them  shortly  in  another  place. 

It  has  been  already  intimated,  or  shown  as  a  possible 
thing,  that  the  race,  regarded  as  an  order  of  powers,  may 
break  loose  from  God's  control  and  fall  into  sin.  Will 
they  so  break  loose  ?  Eegarding  them  simply  as  made 
and  set  forth  on  the  course  of  training  necessary  to  their 
establishment  in  holy  virtue,  will  they  retain  their  inno- 
cence? Have  we  any  reason  to  think,  and  if  so  what 


104  PROBABILITY    OF    EVIL, 

reason  to  think,  that  they  will  drop  their  allegiance  and 
try  the  experiment  of  evil  ? 

It  is  very  certain  that  God  desires  no  such  result. 
When  it  takes  place,  it  will  be  against  His  will  and  against 
every  attribute  of  his  infinitely  beneficent  and  pure  char- 
acter. It  will  only  be  true  that  he  has  created  moral  and 
accountable  beings  with  this  peril  incident,  rather  than  to 
create  only  nature  and  natural  things ;  having  it  in  view, 
as  the  glorious  last  end  of  his  plan,  finally  to  clear  us  of 
sin  by  passing  us,  since  we  will  descend  to  it,  completely 
through  it.  He  will  have  given  us,  or,  at  least,  the  orig- 
inal new-created  progenitors,  a  constituency  perfect  mold ; 
so  that,  taken  simply  as  forms  of  being,  apart  from  any 
character  begun  by  action,  they  are  in  that  exact  harmony 
and  perfection  that,  without  or  before  deliberation,  spon- 
taneously runs  to  good;  organically  ready,  with  all  heav- 
enly affinities  in  play,  to  break  out  in  a  perfect  song.  So 
far  they  are  innocent  and  holy  by  creation,  or  by  the 
simple  fact  of  their  constituent  perfection  in  the  image  of 
their  Maker ;  only  there  is  no  sufficient  strength,  or  secu- 
rity in  their  holiness,  because  there  is  no  deliberative  ele- 
ment in  it.  Deliberation,  when  it  comes,  as  come  it  must, 
will  be  the  inevitable  fall  of  it ;  and  then,  when  the  side  of 
counsel  in  them  is  sufficiently  instructed  by  that  fall  and 
the  bitter  sorrow  it  yields,  and  the  holy  freedom  is  restored, 
it  may  be  or  become  an  eternally  enduring  principle. 
Spontaneity  in  good,  without  counsel,  is  weak;  counsel 
and  deliberative  choice,  without  spontaneity,  are  only  a 
character  begun ;  issued  in  spontaneity,  they  are  the  solid 
reality  of  everlasting  good.  Still  it  will  not,  even  then, 
be  true  that  God  has  contrived  their  sin,  as  a  means  of  the 
ulterior  good,  though  it  may  be  true  that  they,  by  their 


AGAINST    THE    WILL    OF    GOD.  105 

knowledge  of  it  as  being  only  evil,  will  be  intelligently 
fixed,  forever  afterward,  in  their  abhorrence  of  it.  Nor, 
if  we  speak  of  sin  as  permitted  in  this  view  by  God,  will 
it  be  any  otherwise  permitted,  than  as  not  being  prevented, 
either  by  the  non-creation,  or  by  the  uncreating  of  the  race. 

It  may  appear  to  some  that  such  a  view  of  God's  rela- 
tions to  sin  excludes  the  fact,  or  faith  of  an  eternal  plan, 
showing  God  to  be,  in  fact,  the  victim  of  sin;  having 
neither  power  to  withstand  it,  nor  any  system  of  purposes 
able  to  include  and  manage  it.  On  this  subject  of  fore- 
ordination  or  predetermined  plan,  there  is  a  great  deal  of 
very  crude  and  confused  speculation.  If  there  be  any 
truth  which  every  Christian  ought  to  assume,  as  evident 
beyond  all  question,  it  is  that  God  has  some  eternal  plan 
that  includes  every  thing,  and  puts  every  thing  in  its 
place.  That  He  "foreordains  whatsoever  comes  to  pass "  is 
only  another  version  of  the  same  truth.  Nor  is  there  any 
the  least  difficulty  in  distinguishing  the  entire  consistency  of 
this  with  all  that  we  have  said  concerning  God's  relations 
to  the  existence  of  evil — no  difficulty,  in  fact,  which  does 
not  occur  in  phrasing  the  conduct  and  doings  even  of  men. 

Suppose,  for  example,  that  some  person,  actuated  by  a 
desire  to  benefit,  or  bless  society,  takes  it  in  hand  to  estab- 
lish and  endow  a  school  of  public  charity.  In  such  a  case, 
he  will  go  into  a  careful  consideration  of  all  the  possible 
plans  of  organization,  with  a  view  to  select  the  best.  In 
order  to  make  the  case  entirely  parallel,  suppose  him  to 
have  a  complete  intuition  of  these  plans,  or  possibilities — 
A,  B,  and  C,  &c.,  on  to  the  end  of  the  alphabet ;  so  that, 
given  each  plan,  or  possibility,  with  all  its  features  and 
appointments,  he  can  see  precisely  what  will  follow — all 
the  good,  all  the  mischief,  that  will  be  incurred  by  every 


106  GOD    STILL    GOVEENS 

child  that  will  ever  attend  the  school.  For,  in  each  of 
these  plans  or  possibles,  there  are  mischiefs  incident ;  and 
there  will  be  children  attendant,  who,  by  reason  of  no 
fault  of  the  school,  but  only  by  their  perverse  abuse  of  it, 
will  there  be  ruined.  The  benefactor  and  founder,  having 
thus  discovered  that  a  certain  plan,  D,  combines  the  great- 
est amount  of  good  results  and  the  smallest  of  bad  ones, 
the  question  rises  whether  he  shall  adopt  that  plan  ?  By 
the  supposition  he  must,  for  it  is  the  best  possible.  And 
yet,  by  adopting  that  plan,  he  perceives  that  he  will  make 
certain  also  every  particular  one  of  the  mischiefs  that  will 
be  suffered  by  the  abuse  of  it,  and  so  the  ruin  of  every 
child  that  will  be  ruined  under  it.  As  long  as  the  plan  is 
only  a  possible,  a  thing  of  contemplation,  no  mischiefs  are 
suffered,  no  child  is  ruined ;  but  the  moment  he  decides  to 
make  the  plan  actual,  or  set  the  school  on  foot,  he  decides, 
makes  certain,  or,  in  that  sense,  foreordinates,  all  the  par- 
ticular bad  conduct  and  all  the  particular  undoing  there 
to  be  wrought,  as  intuitively  seen  by  him  beforehand. 
Nothing  of  this  would  come  to  pass  if  the  school,  D,  were 
not  founded ;  and,  in  simply  deciding  on  the  plan,  with  a 
perfect  perception  of  what  will  take  place  under  it,  he 
decides  the  bad  results  as  well  as  the  good,  though  in 
senses  entirely  different.  The  bad  are  not  from  him,  nor 
from  any  thing  he  has  introduced,  or  appointed;  but 
wholly  from  the  abuses  of  his  beneficence  practiced  by 
others  whom  he  undertook  to  bless.  The  good  is  all  from 
him,  being  that  for  which  he  established  the  school.  Both 
are  knowingly  made  certain,  or  foreordained  by  his  act. 

In  this  illustration  it  is  not  difficult  to  distinguish  the 
true  relation  of  Grod  to  the  existence  of  evil.  In  selecting 
the  best  possible  plan  among  the  millions  of  possibles 


BY    AN    ETEKNAL    PLAN.  107 

open  to  his  contemplation,  and  deciding  to  set  on  foot,  or 
actualize  that  particular  universe,  he  also  made  certain  all 
the  evils,  or  mischiefs  seen  to  be  connected  with  it.  But 
they  are  not  from  him  because  they  are,  in  this  indirect 
manner,  made  certain,  or  foreordinated  by  him.  It  is 
hardly  right  to  say  that  they  are  permitted  by  him.  They 
come  in  only  as  necessary  evils  that  environ  the  best  plan 
possible.  Such  are  the  relations  of  God  to  the  existence 
of  evil.  If  it  comes,  it  is  not  from  Him,  any  more  than 
the  ruin  of  certain  children  in  the  school,  just  supposed, 
are  from  the  benevolent  founder.  And  yet  He  is  not  dis- 
appointed, or  frustrated.  Still  He  governs  with  a  plan,  a 
perfect  and  eternal  plan,  which  comprehends,  in  its  exact 
date  and  place,  every  thing  which  every  wrong-doing  and 
revolting  spirit  will  do,  even  to  the  end  of  the  world. 

Thus  far  we  have  spoken  of  God's  relations  to  the  ex-,, 
istence  of  evil,  or  its  possible  prevention.  We  pass  over 
now  to  the  side  of  his  subjects ;  and  there  we  shall  find 
reason,  as  regards  their  self-retention,  to  believe  that  the 
certainty  of  their  sin  is  originally  involved  in  their  spiritual 
training  as  powers.  Made  organically  perfect,  set  as  full  in 
God's  harmony  as  they  can  be,  in  the  mold  of  their  con- 
stitution, surrounded  by  as  many  things  as  possible  to 
allure  them  to  ways  of  obedience  and  keep  them  from  the 
seductions  of  sin,  we  shall  discover  still  that,  given  the 
fact  of  their  begun  existence,  and  their  trial  as  persons  or 
powers,  they  are  in  a  condition  privative  that  involves 
their  certain  lapse  into  evil. 

If  the  language  I  employ  in  speaking  of  this  matter  is 
peculiar,  it  is  because  I  am  speaking  with  caution  and 
carefully  endeavoring  to  find  terms  that  will  convey  the 


108 

right,  separated  from  any  false,  impression.  I  speak  of  a 
"condition  privative,"  it  will  be  observed;  not  of  any 
positive  ground,  or  cause,  or  necessity ;  for,  if  there  were 
any  natural  necessity  for  sin,  it  would  not  be  sin.  If  it 
were  caused,  as  all  simply  natural  events  are  caused ;  or, 
what  is  the  same,  if  it  were  a  natural  effect,  it  would  not 
be  sin.  We  might  as  well  blame  the  running  of  the 
rivers,  in  such  a  case,  as  the  wrong  doing  of  men ;  for 
what  we  may  call  their  wrong  doing  is,  after  all,  nothing 
but  the  run  of  causes  hid  in  their  person,  as  gravity  is  hid 
in  the  running  waters.  If  we  could  show  a  positive 
ground  for  sin ;  that  man,  for  example,  is  a  being  whose 
nature  it  is  to  choose  the  strongest  motive,  as  of  a  scale- 
beam  to  be  turned  by  the  heaviest  weight,  and  that  the 
strongest  motive,  arranged  to  operate  on  men,  is  the 
motive  to  do  evil,  that  in  fact  would  be  the  denial  of  sin, 
or  even  of  its  possibility ;  indeed  it  is  so  urged  by  the 
disciples  of  naturalism  on  every  side.  So  again  if  we 
could,  in  a  way  of  positive  philosophy,  account  for  the 
existence  of  evil — exactly  what  multitudes  even  of  Chris- 
tian believers  set  themselves  to  do,  not  observing  that,  if 
they  could  execute  their  endeavor,  they  could  also  make 
as  good  answer  for  evil,  on  the  judgment-day  of  the 
world — if,  I  say,  we  could  properly  and  positively  account 
for  evil,  in  this  manner,  it  would  not  be  evil  any  longer. 
When  we  speak  of  accounting  for  any  thing,  we  suppose 
a  discovery  of  first  principles  to  which  it  may  be  referred ; 
but  sin  can  be  referred  to  no  first  principles,  it  is  simply 
the  act  of  a  power  that  spurns  all  inductives  back  of  the 
doer's  will,  and  asserts  itself,  apart  from  all  first  principles, 
or  even  against  them.  Therefore,  to  avoid  all  these  false 
implications,  and  present  the  simple  truth  of  fact,  I  speak 


NOT    FROM    A    GROUND    POSITIVE.  109 

of  a  "condition  privative;"  by  which  I  mean  a  moral 
state  that  is  only  inchoate,  or  incomplete,  lacking  some- 
thing not  yet  reached,  which  is  necessary  to  the  probable 
rejection  of  evil.  Thus  an  infant  child  runs  directly 
toward,  and  will,  in  fact,  run  into,  the  fire ;  not  because  of 
any  necessity  upon  him,  but  simply  because  he  is  in  a 
condition  privative,  as  regards  the  experience  needed  to 
prevent  him.  I  said  also  "  involves  the  certain  lapse  into 
evil"  —  not  "produces,"  "infers,"  "makes  necessary." 
There  is  no  connection  of  science  or  law  between  the  sub- 
ject and  predicate,  such  that,  one  being  given,  the  other 
holds  by  natural  consequence;  and  yet  this  condition 
privative  "involves,"  according  to  our  way  of  apprehend- 
ing it,  a  certain  conviction  or  expectation  of  the  event 
stated.  Thus  we  often  attain  to  expectations  concerning 
the  conduct  of  men,  as  fixed  as  those  which  we  hold  con- 
cerning natural  events,  where  the  connection  of  cause  and 
consequence  is  absolute.  We  become  acquainted,  as  we 
say,  with  a  certain  person ;  we  learn  how  he  works  in  his 
freedom,  or  how,  as  a  power  acting  from  himself,  he  is 
wont  to  carry  himself  in  given  conditions ;  and  finally  we 
attain  to  a  sense  of  him  so  intimate  that,  given  almost  any 
particular  occasion,  or  transaction,  touching  his  interest, 
we  have  an  expectation,  or  confidence  regarding  what  he 
will  do,  about  .as  fixed  as  we  have  in  the  connections  of  nat- 
ural events.  The  particular  thing  done  to  him  "  involves," 
in  our  apprehension,  as  the  certain  fact,  that  he  will  do  a 
particular  thing  consequent.  And  yet  we  have  no  concep- 
tion that  he  is  determined,  in  such  matters,  by  any  causa- 
tion, or  law  of  necessary  connection;  the  certainty  we 
feel  is  the  certainty,  not  of  a  thing,  but  of  a  power  in  the 
sovereign  determination  of  his  liberty.  In  this  and  no 

10 


110  OUR    NECESSARY    DEFECT 

other  sense  do  we  speak  of  a  condition  privative,  that 
involves  a  certain  lapse  into  evil. 

Having  distinguished,  in  this  careful  manner,  the  true 
import  of  the  terms  employed,  it  now  remains  to  look  for 
that  condition  privative  on  which  so  much  depends.  And 
we  shall  discover  it  in  three  particulars. 

1.  In  the  necessary  defect  of  knowledge  and  consequent 
weakness  of  a  free  person,  or  power,  considered  as  having 
just  begun  to  be.  We  must  not  imagine,  because  he  is  a 
power,  able  in  his  action  to  set  himself  above  all  natural 
causes  and  act  originatively  as  from  himself,  that  he  is 
therefore  strong.  On  the  contrary,  even  though  he  begins 
in  the  full  maturity  of  his  persoDj  having  a  constitution 
set  in  perfect  harmony  with  the  divine  order  and  truth,  he 
is  the  weakest,  most  imperfect  of  beings.  The  stones  of 
the  world  are  strong  in  their  destiny,  because  it  stands  in 
(rod,  under  laws  of  causation  fixed  by  Him.  But  free 
agents  are  weak  because  they  are  free ;  left  to  act  originat- 
ively, held  fast  by  no  superior  determination,  bound  to  no 
sure  destiny ;  save  as  they  are  trained  into  character,  in 
and  through  their  experience. 

Our  argument  forbids  that  we  should  assume  the  truth 
of  the  human  genesis  reported  in  scripture  history;  for 
that  is  commonly  denied  by  naturalism.  I  may  not  even 
assume  that  we  are  descended  of  a  common  stock.  But 
this,  at  least,  is  certain,  that  we  each  began  to  be,  and 
therefore  we  may  the  -more  properly  take  the  case  of  Ad- 
am for  an  example ;  because,  not  being  corrupted  by  any 
causes  back  of  him,  as  we  most  certainly  are,  and,  making 
a  beginning  in  the  full  "maturity  of  his  powers,  he  may  be 
supposed  to  have  had  some  advantages  for  standing  fast 
in  the  right,  which  we  have  not. 


_^ 


*  <-V.   t~\  '  w^ 


OP    KNOWLEDGE.  Ill 

As  we  look  upon  him,  raising  the  question  whether  he 
has  moral  strength  to  stand,  we  observe,  first  of  all,  that 
being  in  a  perfect  form  of  harmony,  uncorrupted,  clean, 
in  one  word,  a  complete  integer,  he  must  of  course  be 
spontaneous  to  good,  and  can  never  fall  from  it  until  his 
spontaneity  is  interrupted  by  some  reflective  exercise  of 
contrivance  or  deliberative  judgment.  But  this  will  come 
to  pass,  without  fail,  in  a  very  short  time;  because  he  is 
not  only  spontaneous  to  good,  but  is  also  a  reflective  and 
deliberative  being.  And  then  what  shall  become  of  his 
integrity? 

Entering  still  further  into  his  case,  as  we  raise  this  ques- 
tion, we  perceive  that  he  holds  a  place,  or  point,  in  his  ac- 
tion, between  two  distinct  ranges  of  thought  and  motivity ; 
between  necessary  ideas  on  one  hand,  and  knowledges  or 
judgments  drawn  from  experience,  on  the  other.  In  the 
first  place,  being  a  man,  he  has  necessarily  developed  in 
his  consciousness  the  law  of  right.  He  thinks  the  right, 
and,  in  thinking  it,  feels  himself  eternally  bound  by  it. 
We  may  call  it  an  idea  in  him,  or  a  law,  or  a  category  of 
his  being.  He  would  not  be  a  man  without  it;  for  it  is 
only  in  connection  with  this,  and  other  necessary  ideas, 
that  he  ranges  above  the  animals.  Animals  have  no  ne- 
cessary ideas;  these,  especially  such  as  are  moral,  are  the 
necessary  and  peculiar  furniture  of  man.  What  could  a 
man  do  in  the  matter  of  justice,  inquiring  after  it,  deter- 
mining what  it  is,  if  the  idea  of  justice  were  not  first  de- 
veloped, as  a  standard  thought  or  idea,  in  his  mind? 
Who  would  set  himself  on  inquiries  after  true  things  and 
judgments,  if  the  idea  of  truth  were  not  in  him,  as  a  regu- 
lative thought,  or  category  of  his  nature?  Thus  it  is,  by 
our  idea  of  right,  that  we  are  set  to  the  conceiving,  or 


112  OUR    NECESSARY    DEFECT 

thought  of  duty,  as  well  as  placed  under  obligation  itself; 
and  we  could  not  so  much  as  raise  the  question  of  virtue 
or  morality,  if  we  were  not  first  configured  to  iis  law,  and 
set  in  action  as  being  consciously  under  it.  Herein,  too, 
we  are  specially  resembled  to  God;  for,  by  this  same  idea 
of  right,  necessary,  immutable,  eternal,  it  is  that  He  is 
placed  in  obligation,  and  it  is  by  His  ready  and  perfect 
homage  to  this  that  His  glorious  character  is  built.  And 
this  law  is  absolute  or  unconditional  to  Him  as  to  us,  to  us 
as  to  Him.  No  matter  what  may  befall,  or  not  befal  us, 
on  the  empirical  side  of  our  life.  No  impediment,  no 
threat,  or  fear,  or  force  can  excuse  us ;  least  of  all  can  any 
mere  condition  privative,  such  as  ignorance,  inexperience, 
or  the  want  of  opposing  motive.  Simply  to  have  thought 
the  right,  is  to  be  under  obligation  to  it,  without  any  mo- 
tive or  hope  in  the  world  of  experience,  and  despite  of  all 
opposing  motives  there.  Even  if  the  worlds  fall  on  us, 
we  must  do  the  right. 

Pass  over  now  from  the  absolute  or  ideal  side  of  our 
existence,  to  the  contingent,  or  empirical.  Here  we  are, 
dealing  with  effects,  consequences,  facts;  trying  our 
strength  in  attempts;  computing,  comparing,  judging, 
learning  how  to  handle  things,  and  how  they  will  handle 
us.  And  by  this  kind  of  experience  we  get  all  the  furni- 
ture of  our  mind  and  character,  save  what  we  have  as  it 
were  concreated  in  us,  in  those  necessary  ideas  of  which 
we  have  spoken,  and  which  are  presupposed  in  all  expe- 
rience. What  now,  reverting  to  the  case  of  Adam,  as  a 
just  begun  existence,  is  the  amount  of  his  experimental, 
empirical,  or  historic  knowledge?  The  knowledges  we 
here  inquire  after,  it  will  be  observed,  are  such  as  are  got- 
ten historically,  one  by  one,  and  one  after  another}  under 


OF    KNOWLEDGE. 

conditions  of  time ;  by  seeing,  doing,  suffering,  comparing, 
distinguishing,  remembering,  and  other  like  operations. 
A  man's  knowledge  here  is  represented,  of  course,  by 
what  he  has  been  through,  and  felt,  and  thought.  What 
then  can  he  know,  at  the  first  moment  of  his  being,  when, 
by  the  supposition,  he  has  never  had  a  thought,  or  an  ex- 
perience ;  or,  if  we  take  him  at  a  point  an  hour  or  a  day 
later,  none  but  that  of  a  single  hour  or  day  ?  Being  a  per- 
fectly disposed  creature,  the  first  man  sets  off,  we  will  say, 
in  a  spontaneous  obedience  to  the  right,  which  is  the  abso- 
lute law  of  his  nature  and  is  in  him  originally,  by  the  ne- 
cessary conditions  of  his  nature.  But  there  comes  up 
shortly  a  question  regarding  some  act,  confessedly  not 
right,  or  some  act  which,  being  forbidden,  violates  his 
sense  of  right.  No  matter  what  it  is,  he  can  be  as  prop- 
erly and  will  be  as  effectually  tested,  by  adhering  to  the 
sense  of  obligation,  in  withholding  from  an  apple  forbid- 
den, as  in  any  thing  else.  Here  then  he  stands  upon  the 
verge  of  experimental  wrong,  debating  the  choice.  What 
it  is  in  its  idea,  or  obligatory  principle,  he  knows;  but  what 
it  is  in  the  experience  of  its  fruits  or  consequences  he 
knows  not.  The  discord,-  bitterness,  remorse,  and  inward 
hell  of  wrong  are  hidden,  as  yet,  from  his  view.  If  mi- 
natory words  have  been  used,  pronouncing  death  upon 
him  in  case  of  disobedience,  some  degree  of  apprehension 
may  have  been  awakened  in  him  anticipatively,  under  the 
natural  efficacy  of  manner  and  expression,  which,  even 
prior  to  any  culture  of  experience,  have  a  certain  degree  of 
power.  But  how  little  will  this  amount  to  in  a  way  of 
guard  or  security  for  his  virtue ;  for  he  is  a  knowing  crea- 
ture still ;  wanting  therefore  to  know,  and,  if  it  were  not 
for  this  noble  instinct  of  knowledge,  would  not  be  a  man. 

10* 


114:  OUR    NECESSARY    PERIL 

What  then  is  this  wrong  he  is  debating,  what  does  it  signi- 
fy ?  He  does  not  ask  whether  it  will  bring  him  evil  or  good ; 
for  what  these  are,  experimentally,  he  does  not  know. 
Enough  that  here  is  some  great  secret  of  knowledge  to  be 
opened ;  how  can  he  abstain,  how  refuse  to  break  through 
the  mask  of  this  unknown  something,  and  know !  He  is 
tempted  thus,  we  perceive,  not  by  something  positive, 
placed  in  his  way,  but  by  a  mere  condition  privative,  a  per- 
plexing defect  of  knowledge  incident  to  the  fact  of  his 
merely  begun  existence. 

Doubtless  it  will  be  urged  that  no  such  wrong  would  ever 
be  debated,  if  some  positive  desire  of  the  nature  were  not 
first  excited,  some  constitutional  susceptibility,  or  want, 
drawn  out  in  longing  for  its  object.  Even  so,  precisely 
that  we  have  allowed;  for  what  is  the  desire  of  knowledge 
itself  but  a  positive  and  most  powerful  instinct  of  the  soul. 
Only  the  more  clear  is  it  that,  if  the  desired  knowledge 
were  already  in  possession,  the  temptation  itself  would  be 
over.  So  if  some  bodily  appetite  were  excited ;  how  trivi- 
al and  contemptible  were  this,  or  any  proposed  pleasure, 
if  only  the  tremendous  evil  and  woe  of  the  wrong  were 
already  known,  as  it  will  be  after  years  of  struggle  and 
suffering  in  it.  The  grand  peril  therefore  is  still  seen  to  be 
of  a  privative  and  not  of  a  positive  nature.  There  must 
be  positive  impulses  to  be  governed,  or  else  there  could 
not  be  a  man,  and  the  peril  is  that  there  is  yet  no  experi- 
mental knowledge  on  hand,  and  can  be  none,  sufficient  to 
protect  and  guard  the  process. 

And  yet  the  man  is  guilty  if  he  makes  the  fatal  choice. 
Even  if  the  strongest  motive  were  that  way,  he  is  yet  a 
being  able  to  choose  against  the  strongest,  and  he  consci- 
ously knows  that  he  ought.  In  any  view,  he  is  not 


UNDEK    SUCH    DEFECT.  115 

obliged  to  choose  the  wrong,  more  than  a  child  is  obliged 
to  thrust  his  hand  into  the  blaze  of  a  lamp,  the  experience 
of  which  is  unknown.  The  cases  are,  in  fact,  strongly 
analogous,  save  that  the  wrong-doer  knows  beforehand, 
as  the  child  certainly  does  not,  that  the  act  is  wrong 
or  criminal;  a  consideration  by  which  he  conscious- 
ly ought  to  be  restrained,  be  the  consequences  what  they 
may.  And  yet,  who  can  expect  that  he  will  forever  be 
restrained,  never  breaking  over  this  mysterious  line  to 
make  the  bad  experiment,  or  try  what  is  in  this  unknown 
something  eternally  before  his  eyes!  If  we  rightly  re- 
member, the  false  prophet  somewhere  represents  the  diffi- 
culty of  a  certain  course  of  virtue,  by  that  of  crossing  the 
fiery  gulf  of  hell  upon  a  hair.  Possibly  our  first  man 
may  cross  upon  this  hair  and  keep  his  balance  till  he  is 
completely  over,  but  who  will  expect  him  to  do  it?  He 
may  look  upon  the  tree  of  knowledge  of  good  and  evil, 
(rightly  is  it  named,)  and  pass  it  by.  He  can  do  it ;  there 
is  a  real  possibility  as  there  is  a  real  obligation ;  but  Adam, 
we  are  told,  did  not,  neither  is  there  any  the  least  proba- 
bility that  any  other  of  mankind,  with  all  his  advantages, 
ever  would. 

If  it  should  be  apprehended  by  any  that  a  condition  pri- 
vative, connected  as  it  plainly  is  with  such  perils,  quite 
takes  away  the  guilt  of  sin,  that,  I  answer,  is  by  the  sup- 
position impossible.  It  really  takes  away  nothing.  The 
right  and  only  true  statement  is,  that  the  guilt  of  sin  is  not 
as  greatly  enhanced  as  it  would  be,  if  all  the  knowledge 
needful  to  the  strength  of  virtue  were  supplied.  We  dif- 
fer in  this  matter  from  those  naturalistic  philosophers,  who 
reduce  all  human  wrong  to  weakness,  and  obliterate,  in 
that  manner,  all  the  distinctions  of  good  and  evil.  We 


WHICH    PERIL    DOES    NOT 

really  excuse  nothing ;  we  only  do  not  condemn  as  severely 
as  if  the  eternal  and  absolute  obligation  of  right,  revealed 
in  every  human  bosom,  were  more  thoroughly  fortified  by 
prudential  and  empiric  knowledge. 

It  may  also  be  objected,  as  contrary  to  all  experience, 
as  well  as  to  the  nature  of  sin  itself,  that  sin  should  impart 
strength,  or  increase  the  capacity  of  virtue.  What  in 
fact  does  it  bring,  but  bondage,  disability,  and  death? 
Even  so — this  is  the  knowledge  of  sin,  and  no  one  is  the 
more  capable  of  holiness  on  account  of  it.  It  is  the  very 
point  indeed  of  this  knowledge  that  it  knows  disability, 
helplessness,  despair.  And  exactly  this  it  is  that  prepares 
the  possibility  of  a  new  creation.  Impotence  discovered 
is  the  capacity  of  redemption.  And  then,  when  a  soul 
has  been  truly  regenerated  and  set  in  union  with  God,  its 
bad  experience  will  be  the  condition  of  its  everlasting 
stability  and  strength. 

It  will  naturally  enough  be  objected,  again,  by  some, 
who  hold  the  principle  of  disinterested  and  absolute  vir- 
tue here  assumed,  that  no  mere  defect  of  empirical  knowl- 
edge— the  knowledge  of  prudence  or  self- interest — creates 
a  condition  privative  as  regards  the  security  of  virtue ; — 
what  need  of  experience  to  enforce  obligations  that  are 
perfect,  apart  from  all  consequences?  If  one  is  loving 
Grod,  as  he  ought,  simply  for  his  own  excellence  or  beauty, 
and  living  by  the  inspiration  of  that  excellence,  what  mat- 
ter is  it  whether  he  knows  the  practical  bitterness,  the  woe, 
the  hell  of  sin,  and  understands  the  penal  sanctions  of  re- 
ward and  penalty  set  against  it,  or  not?  Is  he  going  to 
fall  out  of  his  love  and  his  inspired  liberty,  because  he  is 
not  sufficiently  shut  in  to  it  by  fears  and  apprehended 
miseries!  There  is  an  appearance  of  force  in  the  objec- 


EXCUSE    OUR    SIN.  117 

tion,  and  yet  it  is  only  an  appearance.  For,  in  the  first 
place,  it  is  not  assumed  that  Adam,  or  any  other  man,  put 
to  the  trial  of  a  right  life,  is  weak  in  his  spontaneous  obe- 
dience, because  he  is  not  sufficiently  held  to  it  by  the  pru- 
dential motives  of  fear  and  known  destruction;  but  be- 
cause his  curiosity,  as  a  knowing  creature,  is  provoked,  or 
will  be,  by  not  so  much  as  knowing  what  the  motives  are, 
in  a  word,  by  the  profound  mystery  that  overhangs  the 
question  of  wrong  itself.  Indeed  he  does  not  even  so 
much  as  know  what  it  will  do,  whether  it  will  raise 
to  some  unknown  pitch  of  greatness  in  power  and  intelli- 
gence or  not.  In  the  next  place,  it  is  not  assumed  that 
the  prudential  motives  of  reward  and  penalty  will  ever 
recover  any  fallen  spirit  from  his  defections  and  bring  him 
into  the  inspired,  free  state  of  love.  The  office  of  such 
means  and  motives  is  wholly  negative;  viz.,  to  arrest  the 
bad  soul  in  its  evil  and  bring  it  to  a  stand  of  self-renun- 
ciation, where  the  higher  motives  of  the  divine  excellence 
and  love  may  kindle  it.  In  the  third  place,  it  is  not  as- 
sumed that,  when  souls  are  recovered  from  evil,  and  finally 
established  in  holy  liberty,  which  is  the  problem  of  their 
trial,  they  are  made  safe  for  the  coming  eternity  by  know- 
ing how  dreadfully  they  will  be  scorched  by  evil,  in  case 
they  relapse ;  but  their  safety  is  that,  having  been  dread- 
fully scorched  already  by  it,  they  have  thoroughly  proved 
what  is  in  it,  and  extirpated  all  the  fascinations  of  its 
mystery. 

2.  It  is  another  condition  privative,  as  regards  the  mor- 
al perfection  of  powers,  that  they  require  an  empirical 
training,  or  course  of  government,  to  get  them  established 
in  the  absolute  law  of  duty,  and  that  this  empirical  train 


118  INHERENT    NEED    ALSO 

ing  must  probably  have  a  certain  adverse  effect  for  a  time, 
before  it  can  mature  its  better  results.  The  eternal  idea 
of  justice  makes  no  one  just;  that  of  truth  makes  no  one 
true;  that  of  beauty  makes  no  soul  beautiful.  So  the 
eternal  law  of  right  makes  no  one  righteous.  All  these 
standard  ideas  require  a  process  or  drill,  in  the  field  of 
experience,  in  order  to  become  matured  into  characters,  or 
to  fashion  character  in  the  molds  they  supply.  And  this 
process,  or  drill-practice,  will  require  two  economies  or 
courses ;  the  first  of  which  will  be  always  a  failure,  taken 
in  itself,  but  will  furnish,  nevertheless,  a  necessary  ground 
for  the  second,  by  which  its  effects  will  be  converted  into 
benefits;  and  then  the  result — a  holy  character — will  be 
one  of  course  that  presupposes  both. 

The  first  named  course,  or  economy,  is  that  of  law; 
which  is  called,  even  in  scripture,  the  letter  that  killeth. 
The  law  absolute,  of  which  we  just  now  spoke,  is  a  mere- 
ly necessary  idea ;  commanding  us,  from  eternity,  as  it  did 
the  great  Creator  himself — do  right — making  no  specifica- 
tions and  applying  no  motives,  save  what  are  contained  in 
its  own  absolute  excellence  and  authority.  But  the  receiv- 
ing it  in  that  manner,  which  is  the  only  manner  in  which  it 
can  be  truly  received,  supposes  a  mind  and  temper  already 
configured  to  it,  so  as  to  be  in  it  in  mere  love  and  the 
spontaneous  homage  that  enthrones  it,  because  of  its  ex- 
cellence, and  God  because  he  represents  its  excellence. 
Here,  therefore,  is  the  problem,  how  to  produce  this  prac- 
tical configuration.  And  it  is  executed  thus : — God,  as  a 
power  and  a  force  extraneous,  undertakes  for  it,  first  of  all, 
to  enforce  it  empirically,  by  motives  extraneous;  those  of 
reward  and  fear,  profit  and  loss.  He  takes  the  law  abso- 
lute down  into  the  world  of  prudence,  re-enacting  it  there 


OF  THE  LETTER  THAT  KILLETH,     119 

and  preparing  to  train  us  into  it,  by  a  drill-practice  under 
sanctions.  In  one  view,  the  sanctions  added  are  inappro- 
priate ;  for  they  are  opposite  to  all  spontaneity,  being  ap- 
peals to  interest,  and  so  far  calls  that  draw  the  soul  away 
from  the  more  inspiring  considerations  of  inherent  excel- 
lence. The  subject  is  lifted  by  no  inspiration.  He  is 
down  under  the  law,  at  the  best,  trying  to  come  up  to  it 
by  willing,  punctuatim  et  seriatim,  what  particular  things 
are  required  in  the  specifications  made  by  it.  If  we  could 
suppose  the  law  thus  enforced  to  be  perfectly  observed 
under  this  pressure  of  prudential  sanctions,  it  would  only 
make  a  dry,  punctilious  and  painfully  apprehensive  kind 
of  virtue,  without  liberty,  or  dignity.  The  more  probable 
result  is  an  habitual  and  wearisome  selfishness;  for,  as  long 
as  the  mind  is  occupied  by  these  empirical  and  extraneous 
sanctions,  it  is  held  to  the  consideration  of  self-interest 
only ;  and  the  motives  it  is  all  the  while  canvassing,  are 
such  as  the  worst  mind  can  feel,  as  well  as  that  which  is 
truly  upright.  And  yet  there  is  a  benefit  preparing  in 
this  first,  or  legal  economy,  which  is  indispensable;  viz. 
this,  that  it  gives  adhesiveness  to  the  law,  which  otherwise, 
as  being  merely  ideal,  we  might  lightly  dismiss ;  that  the 
friction  it  creates,  like  some  mordant  in  the  dying  process, 
sets  in  the  law  and  fastens  it  practically,  or  as  an  experi- 
mental reality ;  that  the  woes  of  penalty  wage  a  battle  for 
it,  in  which  the  soul  is  continually  worsted  and  so  broken 
in;  that  it  develops  in  short  a  whole  body  of  moral 
judgments  and  convictions,  that  wind  the  soul  about  as 
cords  of  detention,  till  finally  the  law  to  be  enforced  be- 
comes an  experimental  verity  fully  established.  Just 
here  the  soul  begins  to  feel  a  dreadful  coil  of  thraldom 
round  it.  To  get  awav  from  the  law  is  impossible ;  for  it  is 


120  AS    A    STAGE 

hedged  about  with  fire.  To  keep  it  is  impossible ;  for  the 
struggle  is  only  a  heaving  under  self-interested  motive,  to 
get  clear  of  a  state  whose  bane  is  selfishness.  What -it 
means,  the  subject  can  not  find.  He  is  in  a  condition  of 
bitter  thraldom ;  his  sin  appears  to  be  sin  even  more  than 
ever;  and  the  whole  discipline  he  is  under  seems  only  to 
minister  the  knowledge  of  sin;  he  groans,  as  it  were,  un- 
der a  body  of  sin  and  death  that  he  can  not  heave. 

And  so  he  is  made  ready  for  the  second  economy,  that  of 
liberating  grace  and  redemption.  For  now,  in  Christ,  the 
law  returns,  a  person,  clothed  in  all  personal  beauty,  and 
offers  itself  to  the  choice,  even  as  a  friend  and  deliverer;  so 
that,  being  taken  with  love  to  Christ,  and  drawing  near  at 
his  call  in  holy  trust,  the  bondman  is  surprised  to  find  that 
he  is  loving  the  law  as  the  perfect  law  of  liberty ;  which 
was  the  point  to  be  gained  or  carried.  And  so,  what  be- 
gan, as  a  necessary  idea,  is  wrought  into  a  character  and 
become  eternal  fact.  The  whole  operation,  it  will  be  ob- 
served, supposes  a  condition  privative  in  the  subject,  such 
that  he  suffers,  at  first,  a  kind  of  repulsion  by  the  law,  and 
is  only  won  to  it  by  embracing  the  goodness  of  it  in  a  per- 
sonal friend  and  deliverer. 

And  something  like  this  double  administration  of  law 
and  liberty  we  distinguish,  in  many  of  the  matters  even 
of  our  worldly  life.  No  exactness  of  drill  makes  an  army 
efficient  or  invincible,  till  it  is  fired  by  some  free  impulse 
from  the  leader,  or  the  cause ;  and  yet  the  wearisome  and 
tedious  drill  is  a  previous  condition,  without  which  this 
latter  were  impossible.  No  great  work  of  genius  was  ever 
written  in  the  way  of  work,  or  before  the  wings  were 
lifted  by  some  gale  of  inspiration;  which  gale,  again,  would 
never  have  begun  to  blow,  had  not  the  windows  of  thought 


OF    TRANSITION  121 

and  the  chambers  of  light  and  beauty  within  been  opened, 
by  years  of  patient  toil  and  study.  The  artist  plods  on 
wearily,  drudging  in  the  details  of  his  art,  till  finally  the 
inspiration  takes  him  and,  from  that  point  onward,  his 
hand  is  moved  by  his  subject,  with  no  conscious  drudgery 
or  labor.  In  the  family,  we  meet  a  much  closer  and 
equally  instructive  analogy.  The  young  child  is  over- 
taken first  by  the  discipline  of  the  house,  in  a  form  of 
law ;  commanded,  forbidden,  sent,  interdicted,  all  in  a  way 
of  authority,  and  to  that  authority  is  added  something 
which  compels  respect.  If  he  is  a  ductile  and  gentle  child, 
he  will  be  generally  obedient;  but  the  examples  are  few  in 
which  the  child  will  not  sometimes  be  openly  restive,  or 
even  stiffen  himself  in  willful  disobedience.  In  any  case, 
it  will  be  law,  not  coinciding  always  with  the  child's  wish 
es,  or  his  opinions  of  pleasure  and  advantage ;  and  there 
will  be  a  sense  of  constraint,  more  or  less  irksome,  as  if 
the  authority  felt  were  repugnant  and  contrary  to  the  de- 
sired happiness.  By  and  by,  however,  authority  changes 
its  aspect  and  becomes  lovely.  The  habit  of  obedience, 
the  experience  had  of  parental  fidelity  and  tenderness,  and 
the  discovery  made  of  absurdity  and  hidden  mischief  in 
the  things  interdicted,  as  it  seemed  arbitrarily,  gradually 
abolishes  the  sense  of  law  and  substitutes  a  control  not 
felt  before,  the  control  of  personal  love  and  respect.  So 
that,  finally,  the  man  of  thirty  will  carefully  and  rever- 
ently anticipate  the  minutest  wishes  of  a  parent,  and,  if  that 
can  be  called  obedience,  will  obey  him ;  when,  as  a  child 
of  three,  he  could  barely  endure  his  authority,  and  sub- 
mitted to  it  only  because  it  was  duty  enforced. 

Such  is  the  analogy  of  common  life.     Law  and  liberty 
are  the  two  grand  terms  under  which  it  is  passed — law 

11 


TO    SPIKITUAL    LIBERTY. 

first  and  liberty  afterward.  And  with  all  this  corresponds 
what  is  said,  in  the  New  Testament,  of  law  as  related  to 
gospel.  It  is  said,  in  one  view,  of  the  laborious  ritual  of 
Moses;  yet,  by  this  historic  reference,  it  is  designed  to 
lead  the  mind  back  into  a  more  general  and  deeper  truth. 
It  is  called  "the  letter  that  killeth,"  as  related  to  "the 
spirit  that  giveth  life."  It  is  said  to  have  its  value  in  the 
development  of  knowledge;  for  by  the  law  is  "the  knowl- 
edge of  sin" — "that  sin  by  the  commandment  might  be- 
come exceeding  sinful."  It  is  bondage  introducing  and 
preparing  liberty.  "The  law  gendereth  to  bondage," 
but  the  gospel,  'Jerusalem  that  is  above,  is  free.'"  "If 
there  had  been  a  law  that  could  have  given  life,  verily 
righteousness  should  have  been  by  the  law;"  but  that  was 
impossible.  "It  is  the  schoolmaster  to  bring  us  to  Christ," 
and  then,  having  embraced  him,  he  becomes  a  new  inspir- 
ation in  our  love,  after  which  we  no  more  need  "to  be 
under  a  schoolmaster."  "The  law  made  nothing  perfect, 
but  the  bringing  in  of  a  better  hope  did." 

There  is  reason  to  suspect  that  many  will  reject  what  I 
am  here  advancing.  They  will  do  it,  of  course,  for  the 
simple  reason  that  they  know  no  other  kind  of  virtue  but 
that  which  is  legal,  having  therefore,  in  their  conscious- 
ness, nothing  which  answers  to  the  liberty  of  the  Spirit. 
To  them,  what  I  have  here  said  will  have  an  appearance 
of  cant.  Exactly  contrary  to  which,  I  affirm  it  as  the  only 
competent  philosophy,  perceiving,  I  think,  as  clearly  as  I 
perceive  any  thing,  that  the  conjunction  discovered  in 
Christianity  of  these  two  ministrations  is  not  any  casual 
or  accidental  matter — as  if  men  had  somehow  fallen  un- 
der law,  and  God  was  constrained,  afterward,  to  do  some- 
thing for  them — on  the  contrary  that  the  whole  manage- 


A    THIRD    LIABILITY  123 

ment  is  from  before  the  foundation  of  the  world,  having 
respect  to  a  grand  antecedent  necessity,  involved  in  the 
perfecting  of  virtue.  God  never  proposed  to  perfect  a 
character  in  men  by  mere  legal  obedience.  But  he  insti- 
tuted law  originally,  no  doubt,  as  a  first  stage,  preparatory 
to  a  second ;  both  of  which  were  to  be  kept  on  foot  to- 
gether, and  both  of  which  are  blended,  in  one  way  or  an- 
other, probably,  in  the  training  of  all  holy  minds  in  all 
worlds. 

3.  There  appears  to  be  yet  another  condition  privative, 
as  regards  our  security  against  sin,  in  the  social  relation  of 
powers  and  their  trial  in  and  through  that  relation ;  viz., 
that  they  are,  at  first,  exposed  to  invasions  of  malign  in- 
fluence from  each  other,  which  can  nowise  be  effectually 
prevented,  save  as  they  are  finally  fortified  by  the  defenses 
of  character.  In  this  view,  if  I  am  right,  a  great  part  of 
the  problem  of  existence  must  consist  in  what  may  be 
called  the  fencing  of  powers;  that  is,  by  assorting  and  sep- 
arating the  good  from  the  bad,  and  rendering  one  class  in- 
accessible to  the  arts  and  annoyances  of  the  other. 

The  individual,  as  we  have  seen,  is  to  be  perfected  for 
society ;  and,  for  that  reason,  he  must  needs  have  his  trial 
in  and  through  society.  A  still  wider  truth  appears  to  be 
that  the  perfect  society  thus  preparing  is  to  be  one  and 
universal,  comprehending  the  righteous  populations  of  all 
worlds  and  ages;  for  the  terms  of  duty  and  religion  are 
in  their  nature  universal;  and  for  this  reason  it  appears 
also  to  be  necessary,  that  the  trial  and  training  should  be 
in  some  open  field  of  activity  common  to  all  the  powers. 
Accordingly,  as  we  are  made  with  social,  and,  if  I  may 
use  the  term,  commercial  natures;  having  inlets  of  sympa- 


124  TO    INVASION, 

thy  and  impression,  by  which  we  may  feel  one  another; 
capacities  to  receive  and  give,  to  wrong,  to  offend,  to  com- 
fort, to  strengthen,  to  seduce,  and  betray  one  another;  so 
there  is  an  antecedent  probability  that  the  terms  of  social 
exposure  will  involve  some  possibility  of  access,  on  the 
part  of  beings  unseen,  that  are  not  of  our  race.  Indeed, 
if  it  should  happen  that  spirits  are  impossible  to  be  sorted 
and  fenced  apart  by  walls  of  matter,  or  gulfs  of  distance, 
or  abysses  of  emptiness,  something  like  this  would  seem 
to  be  necessarily  involved,  till  they  are  sorted  and  the 
gates  of  commerce  are  shut  fast,  by  the  repulsions  of  con- 
trary affinities.  And  accordingly,  till  this  takes  place, 
there  must  be  exposures  to  good  and  malign  influence, 
more  numerous  than  we  can  definitely  mark  or  distinguish. 

With  this  corresponds,  it  will  be  observed,  all  that  is 
said  in  the  scriptures  of  the  activity  of  ministering  angels 
engaged  to  confirm  and  comfort  us,  the  insidious  arts  of  a 
bad  spirit  to  accomplish  our  fall,  and  the  manifold  entice- 
ments and  malignant  possessions  of  evil  demons  generally. 
But  I  advert  to  these  representations,  it  will  be  observed, 
not  in  a  way  of  assuming  their  authenticity,  for  that  is  for- 
bidden by  the  nature  of  my  argument.  I  only  cite  them 
as  offering  conceptions  to  our  mind,  or  imagination,  that 
may  be  necessary  to  a  full  comprehension  of  what  is  in- 
cluded in  the  subject. 

Many  will  object  most  sturdily  and  peremptorily,  I  am 
well  aware,  to  the  possibility  of  enticements  and  arts,  prac- 
ticed by  unseen  agents,  to  draw  us  off  from  our  fidelity  to 
God;  alledging  that  such  an  exposure  impeaches  the 
fatherhood  of  God,  and  virtually  destroys  our  responsi- 
bility. But  what  if  it  should  happen  to  be  involved,  as 
the  necessary  condition  of  any  properly  social  existence  ? 


AT    A    GREAT    DISADVANTAGE,  125 

And  it  might  as  well  be  urged  that  every  temptation  is  an 
impeachment  of  God,  which  comes  from  sources  unseen, 
being  an  approach  that  takes  us  off  our  guard,  and  upsets 
the  balance,  possibly,  of  our  judgments,  just  when  we  are 
most  implicitly  confiding  in  them.  Allowing  such  an  ob- 
jection therefore,  responsibility  would  be  impossible;  for 
who  of  us  was  ever  able  to  see  distinctly,  by  what  avenues 
all  of  his  temptations  or  enticements  came?  Besides,  say- 
ing nothing  of  bad  spirits,  by  how  many  methods,  by  air, 
look,  sympathy,  do  we  produce  immediate  impressions  in 
each  other,  whose  sources  are  never  noted  or  suspected ; 
conveying  sentiments,  drawing  to  this  or  that,  fascinating, 
magnetizing,  playing  upon  one  another,  by  methods  as 
subtle  and  secret,  as  if  the  mischief  came  from  powers  of 
darkness.  And  yet  we  never  imagine  that  such  entice- 
ments encroach  at  all  on  the  grounds  of  our  just  responsi- 
bility ;  and  all  for  the  manifest  reason  that  it  never  mat- 
ters whence  our  enticements  come,  or  by  what  arts  the 
color  of  our  judgments  is  varied  and  their  equilibrium 
disturbed;  still  we  know,  in  all  cases,  that  the  wrong  is 
wrong,  and  knowing  that  is  enough  to  complete  our  re- 
sponsibility. 

I  am  well  aware  of  the  modern  tendency  to  resolve 
what  is  said  on  this  subject  in  the  scripture  into  figures  of 
speech,  excluding  all  idea  of  a  literal  intermeddling  of 
bad  spirits.  But  that  there  are  bad  spirits,  there  is  no 
more  reason  to  doubt,  than  that  there  are  bad  men,  (who 
are  in  fact  bad  spirits,)  and  as  little  that  the  bad  spirits  are 
spirits  of  mischief,  and  will  act  in  character,  according  to 
their  opportunity.  As  regards  the  possession  by  foul  spir- 
its, it  has  been  maintained,  by  many  of  the  sturdiest  sup- 
porters of  revelation,  and  by  reference  to  the  words  em  • 

11* 


126  FROM    THE    ASSAULTS 

ployed  in  one  or  two  cases  by  the  evangelists  themselves, 
that  they  were  only  diseases  regarded  in  that  light.  Oth- 
ers have  assumed  the  necessary  absurdity  of  these  posses- 
sions without  argument;  and  still  others  have  made  them 
a  subject  of  much  scoffing  and  profane  ridicule.  For 
the  last  half-century,  and  contemporaneously  with  our 
modern  advances  in  science,  there  has  been  a  general 
gravitation  of  opinion,  regarding  this  and  many  other 
points,  toward  the  doctrine  of  the  Sadducees.  Which 
makes  it  only  the  more  remarkable,  that  now,  at  last,  a 
considerable  sect  of  our  modern  Sadducees  themselves, 
who  systematically  reject  the  faith  of  any  thing  supernat- 
ural, are  contributing  what  aid  they  can  to  restore  the 
precise  faith  of  the  New  Testament,  respecting  foul  spirits. 
They  do  not  call  their  spiritual  visitors  devils,  or  their  de- 
monized  mediums  possessed  persons.  But  the  low  man- 
ners of  their  spirits  and  the  lying  oracles  which  it  is  agreed 
that  some  of  them  give,  and  the  power  they  display  of 
acting  on  the  lines  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature,  when 
thumping  under  tables,  jolting  stoves,  and  floating  men 
and  women  through  the  upper  spaces  of  rooms,  proves 
them  to  be,  if  they  are  any  thing,  supernatural  beings; 
leaving  no  appreciable  distinction  between  them  and  the 
demoniacal  irruptions  of  scripture.  For  though  there  be 
some  talk  of  electricity  and  science,  and  a  show  of  reduc- 
ing the  new  discovered  commerce  to  laws  of  calculable 
recurrence,  it  is  much  more  likely  to  be  established  by 
their  experiments,  as  a  universal  fact,  that  whatever  being, 
of  whatever  world,  opens  himself  to  the  visitation,  or  in- 
vites the  presence  of  powers,  indiscriminately  as  respects 
their  character,  whether  it  be  under  some  thin  show  of 
scientific  practice  or  not,  will  assuredly  have  the  commerce 


OF    BAD    SPIRITS.  127 

invited !  Far  enough  is  it  from  being  either  impossible, 
or  incredible,  and  exactly  this  is  what  our  new  school  of 
charlatanism  suggests,  that  immense  multitudes  of  powers, 
interfused,  in  their  self-active  liberty,  through  all  the 
abysses  and  worlds  of  nature,  have  it  as  the  battle-field 
of  their  good  or  malign  activity,  doing  in  it  and  upon  it, 
as  the  scriptures  testify,  acts  supernatural  that  extend  to 
us.  This  being  true,  what  shall  be  expected,  but  that 
where  there  is  any  thing  congenial  in  temper  or  character 
to  set  open  the  soul,  and  nothing  of  antipathy  to  repel ; 
or  where  any  one,  through  a  licentious  curiosity,  a  fool- 
ish conceit  of  science,  or  a  bad  faith  in  powers  of  ne- 
cromancy, calls  on  spirits  to  come,  no  matter  from  what 
world — in  such  a  case  what  shall  follow,  but  that  troops  of 
malign  powers  rush  in  upon  their  victim,  to  practice  their 
arts  in  him  at  will.  I  know  nothing  at  all  personally  of 
these  new  mysteries ;  but  if  a  man,  as  Townsend  and  many 
others  testify,  can  magnetize  his  patient,  even  at  the  dis- 
tance of  miles,  it  should  not  seem  incredible  that  foul  spir- 
its can  magnetize  also.  This  indeed  was  soon  discovered 
in  the  power  of  spirits  to  come  into  mediums,  and  make 
them  write  and  speak  their  oracles.  It  is  also  a  curious 
coincidence  that  no  one,  as  we  are  told,  can  be  magnetized, 
or  become  a  medium,  or  even  be  duly  enlightened  by  a 
medium,  who  is  uncongenial  in  his  affinities,  or  maintains 
any  quality  of  antipathy  in  his  will,  or  temper,  or  charac- 
ter; for  then  the  commerce  sought  is  impossible.  Beside 
it  is  remarkable  that  the  persons  who  dabble  most  freely 
in  this  kind  of  commerce,  are  seen,  as  a  general  fact,  to 
run  down  in  their  virtue,  lose  their  sense  of  principles, 
and  become  addled,  by  their  familiarity  with  the  powers 
of  mischief. 


128  CONCLUSION    REACHED. 

Iii  these  references  to  bad  spirits,  and  the  matter  of  de- 
monology  in  general,  I  do  not  assume  to  have  established 
any  very  decisive  conclusion ;  for  the  scripture  representa- 
tions can  not  be  assumed  as  true,  and  the  new  demons  of 
science  I  know  nothing  about,  except  by  report.  This 
only  is  made  clear ;  that  the  suggestion  of  a  condition  pri- 
vative in  men,  as  regards  their  defense  against  the  irrup- 
tion of  other  powers,  is  one  that  can  not  be  disproved  by 
any  facts  within  the  compass  of  our  knowledge.  And 
since  other  powers  doubtless  exist,  both  good  and 
bad,  who  are  being  sorted  and  fenced  apart  by  the  con- 
trary affinities  of  character,  nothing  can  be  more  con- 
sonant to  reason  than  that  there  must  be  exposures  to 
unseen  mischief  in  our  trial,  till  these  eternal  fences 
are  raised. 

We  find  then — this  is  the  result  of  our  search — that  sin 
can  nowise  be  accounted  for;  there  are  no  positive  grounds, 
or  principles  back  of  it,  whence  it  may  have  come.  We  only 
discover  conditions  privative,  that  are  involved,  as  neces- 
sary incidents  in  the  begun  existence  and  trial  of  powers. 
These  conditions  privative  are  in  the  nature  of  perils,  and 
while  they  excuse  nothing,  for  the  law  of  duty  is  always 
plain,  they  are  yet  drawn  so  close  to  the  soul  and  open 
their  gulfs,  on  either  hand,  so  deep,  that  our  expectation  of 
the  fall  is  really  as  pressing  as  if  it  were  determined  by 
some  law  that  annihilates  liberty.  Liberty  we  know  is  not 
annihilated.  And  yet  we  say,  looking  on  the  state  of  man 
made  perilous,  in  this  manner,  by  liberty,  that  we  can  not 
expect  him  to  stand. 

Some  persons,  who  are  accustomed  to  receive  the  scrip- 
tures with  great  reverence  and  whose  feeling  therefore  is 


THE    CASE    OF    GOOD    ANGELS  129 

the  more  entitled  to  respect,  may  be  disturbed  by  the 
apprehension,  that  we  violate  what  they  take  for  an  evi- 
dently scriptural  truth  concerning  the  good  angels.  These 
are  finite  beings,  and  had  a  begun  existence,  and  yet  we  are 
taught,  as  it  will  be  urged,  that  they  have  never  fallen ; 
showing  a  complete  possibility  of  creating  free  beings,  or 
powers  that  will  never  sin ; — at  which  point  our  doctrine 
is  seen  to  come  into  open  and  direct  conflict  with  the 
scriptures. 

I  have  no  pleasure,  certainly,  in  raising  a  conflict  with 
any  opinion  not  absolutely  corrupt,  when  it  has  been  so 
long  held,  and  with  such  unquestioning  deference,  by 
multitudes  of  Christian  believers.  But  I  am  obliged,  by 
the  terms  of  my  argument,  to  make  a  revision  of  the  evi- 
dences by  which  this  opinion  is  sustained.  In  the  Ante- 
Copernican  conceptions  of  the  universe,  such  an  opinion 
was  more  likely  to  be  taken  up  than  now ;  and  it  seems  to 
be  a  relic  of  false  interpretation  then  introduced.  I  find 
no  clear  evidence  of  any  such  opinion  in  the  Christian 
scriptures.  They  do  affirm  the  existence  of  good  angels, 
who,  for  aught  that  appears,  have  all  been  passed  through 
and  brought  up  out  of  a  fall,  as  the  redeemed  of  mankind 
will  be.  They  affirm  the  existence  also  of  bad  angels, 
who  certainly  have  not  been  kept  from  the  experiment  or 
choice  of  evil.  A  significant  intimation  is  supposed  to  be 
found  in  the  text, — "  To  the  intent  that  now,  unto  the 
principalities  and  powers  in  heavenly  places,  might  be 
known,  by  the  church,  the  manifold  wisdom  of  God  " — as 
if  here,  for  the  first  time,  they  were  to  be  instructed,  by 
the  fact  of  human  redemption.  But  every  thing  mani- 
festly turns  here  on  the  epithet  "  manifold,"  [VoXu<roixiXos-,J 
which,  in  fact,  means  only  diversified,  not  something  new 


130  AFFORDS    NO    VALID 

and  strange ;  yielding  us  a  hint,  rather,  which  runs  exactly 
contrary  to  the  common  opinion ;  viz.,  that  the  heavenly 
powers  discover,  only  through  the  church  of  our  world, 
another  plan  of  grace  and  mercy  unfolded,  different  from 
their  own.  In  respect  to  the  "  new  song,"  so  often  referred 
to  in  this  connection,  it  is  sufficient  to  say  that  it  is  joined 
by  beings  not  of  our  race,  and  is  abundantly  new  as 
related  to  a  work  of  redemption  among  men ;  different  in 
form  and  manner,  as  in  sphere,  from  any  other. 

But  the  principal  or  hinge  text  on  this  subject  is  the 
6th  verse  of  Jude's  epistle, — "And  the  angels  that  kept 
not  their  first  estate,  but  left  their  own  habitation,  he  hath 
reserved,  &c.," — leaving  the  implication,  it  is  supposed, 
that  other  angels  have  kept  their  first  estate,  and  stood 
fast  in  obedience.  But  this,  it  has  been  shown  by  Mr. 
Faber,  in  a  full  and  somewhat  overdone  discussion,*  is  a 
totally  mistaken  conception  of  the  passage.  The  term 
"  angels,"  he  has  shown,  refers  to  the  "  sons  of  God," 
whose  apostasy  is  set  forth  in  the  6th  chapter  of  Genesis. 
The  term  apx1?*  rendered  "  first  estate,"  as  denoting  a  moral 
condition,  has  no  such  meaning  in  any  known  example. 
It  signifies  rather  a,  principals,  or  principality,  and  the  rep- 
resentation is,  that  certain  persons  of  the  Sethite,  or  church 
people,  growing  lewd  and  dissolute  in  their  life,  went  over 
to  the  corrupt  Cainites  and  joined  them  in  their  vices. 
This  also  is  implied  in  the  phrase  "  left  their  own  habita- 
tion," [oixK]<nipiov,]  their  domicil,  or  native  place  and  coun- 
try ;  language  entirely  malapropos,  when  referred  to  celes- 
tial beings.  Besides  their  crime  was  not  angelic — the 
"  going  after  strange  flesh" — and,  what  is  yet  more  string- 
ent, their  crime  is  defined  by  a  comparison  which  shows 

*  Three  Dispensations,  Vol.  I.,  pp.  344-431. 


OE    SCKIPTURAL    OBJECTION.  131 

exactly  what  it  was — "Even  as  Sodom  and  Gomorrah, 
and  the  cities  about  them,  in  like  manner,  giving 
themselves  over  to  fornication  and  going  after  strange 
flesh,"  &c.  And  finally,  to  render  this  interpretation  yet 
more  certain,  it  is  shown  that  Josephus,  in  speaking  of  the 
"  sons  of  God  "  in  Genesis,  calls  them  angels,  and  uses  the 
same  word  [appc*!,]  principality,  in  describing  their  apos- 
tasy. On  the  whole,  it  does  not  appear  that  there  is  any 
vestige  of  authority,  in  Scripture,  for  the  opinion  that  the 
good  angels  are  beings  that  have  never  sinned. 

Contrary  to  this,  there  are  many  passages  that,  without 
being  severely  pressed,  might  be  made  to  indicate  the  fact 
that  they  are  all  redeemed  spirits.  Thus,  where  the  desire 
of  "angels  to  look  into  these  things"  is  spoken  of,  an 
indication  is  given,  not  that  they  are  unacquainted  with 
any  such  fact  as  redemption,  but  of  the  contrary  fact,  that 
this  appetite  is  whetted  by  their  experience.  Why  should 
they  be  so  eager  to  look  into  a  matter  wholly  unknown? 
So  when  the  angels  break  into  the  sky,  at  the  advent  of 
Christ,  crying  "Peace  on  earth,"  they  seem  to  know,  in 
their  deepest  heart's  feeling  already,  what  this  "peace" 
signifies.  It  is  remarkable  also  that  the  one  only  text  of 
scripture  that  could  fairly  be  insisted  on,  as  a  direct  and 
formal  declaration  of  scripture  on  this  point,  is  that  of  the 
apostle,  when,  extolling  the  universal  headship  of  Christ, 
he  says  what  appears  to  be  directly  contrary  to  all  these 
assumptions, — "  By  him  to  reconcile  all  things  unto  him- 
self, whether  they  be  things  on  earth,  or  things  in 
heaven." 

Falling  back  then  upon  our  own  first  principles,  as  re- 
quired by  the  tenor  of  our  argument,  we  find  that  angels, 
like  men,  are,  by  the  supposition,  finite  beings.  If  finite 


132  NOT    IMPLIED    THAT    SIN 

then  are  they  beings  who  think  in  succession,  one  thing 
after  another,  as  we  do.  If  so,  then  there  was  a  point  in 
the  early  date,  or  first  hours  of  their  existence,  when  they 
had  thought  little  and  had  little  experience,  and  of  course 
knew  as  little  as  they  had  thought.  And  so,  given  the 
fact  of  their  finite  and  begun  existence,  it  seems  to  follow, 
as  a  conclusion,  that  they  were  in  the  same  weakness,  or 
condition  privative,  with  us.  What  then  can  we  judge, 
but  that,  probably,  there  is  some  ground-principle,  or  law, 
common  both  to  them  and  to  us,  that  involves  them  in  the 
same  fortunes  with  us,  and  requires  a  method  of  training 
and  redemption  analagous  to  that  which  is  ordained  for 
men?  God,  as  we  all  agree,  is  a  being  who  works  by 
system — with  a  glorious  variety  and  yet  by  system — and 
it  would  be  singular  for  his  plan  to  break  down  in  some 
little  department  like  ours,  and  go  straight  forward  to  its 
mark,  in  other  and  better-contrived  parts  of  his  creation. 
How  much  better  and  more  consonant  also  to  our  feeling 
to  suppose  that  there  is  some  antecedent  necessity,  inhe- 
rent in  the  conception  of  finite  and  begun  existences,  that, 
in  their  training  as  powers,  they  should  be  passed  through 
the  double  experience  of  evil  and  good,  fall  and  redemp- 
tion. 

At  the  same  time  I  am  not  anxious  to  carry  my  argu- 
ment so  far ;  and  I  readily  concede  that  it  might  be  pre- 
sumptuous to  insist  on  such  a  conclusion,  as  being  one  of 
the  known  truths.  I  only  ask  that  a  similar  concession 
be  allowed,  on  the  other  side,  as  regards  an  opinion  cer- 
tainly not  authenticated  by  scripture ;  for,  when  that  is 
taken  out  of  the  way,  as  being  a  scriptural  objection  to 
my  argument,  I  have  no  longer  any  concern  with  it.  It 
may  not  be  amiss  to  add,  farther,  that  what  I  have 


IS    ANT    MEANS    OP    GOOD.  133 

here  advanced,  in  a  somewhat  positive  form,  concerning 
sin,  I  value  mostly  as  an  hypothesis.  Indeed  what  we 
want,  to  clear  cur  difficulties  here,  is  not  so  much  a  doc- 
trine, as  to  find  that  some  rational  hypothesis  is  possi- 
ble. And  my  object  is  sufficiently  gained  when  that  is 
admitted. 

If  it  should  be  objected  that  my  doctrine,  or  hypothesis 
here,  is  only  another  version  of  the  scheme  that  accounts 
for  sin  as  being  the  necessary  means  of  the  greatest  good, 
it  is  enough  to  answer  that  I  see  no  great  reason  to  be 
concerned  for  it,  even  if  it  were.  Still  I  do  not  perceive 
that  it  proposes  to  account  for  sin  as  being  a  means  of  any 
thing.  It  makes  much  of  the  knowledge  of  sin,  or  of  its 
bitter  consequences,  and  especially  of  the  want  of  that 
knowledge,  save  as  it  is  gotten  by  the  bad  experience  it- 
self. But  the  knowledge  of  sin  is,  in  fact,  knowing — that 
is  the  precise  point  of  it — that  it  is  the  means  of  nothing 
good,  that  it  is  evil  in  all  its  tendencies,  relations,  opera- 
tions, and  results,  and  will  never  bring  any  thing  good  to 
any  being.  If  then  the  knowing  of  sin  to  be  the  possible 
means  of  no  good  is  itself  a  means  of  good,  wherein  does 
it  appear  that  I  am  reproducing  the  doctrine  that  sin  is  the 
necessary  means  of  the  greatest  good?  Because,  it  may 
be  answered,  sin,  as  a  fact  of  consciousness,  is  by  the  sup- 
position the  necessary  means  of  the  knowledge  of  sin. 
But  that,  I  reply,  is  a  trick  of  argument  practiced  on  the 
word  means.  Undoubtedly  sin,  as  a  fact  of  consciousness, 
is  the  necessary  subject  of  the  knowledge  of  sin.  If  it 
were  affirmed  that  the  knowledge  of  certain  sunken  rocks, 
in  the  track  of  some  voyage,  is  necessary  to  a  safe  passage, 
how  easy  to  show,  by  just  the  argument  here  employed,  that, 
since  the  rocks  are  a  necessary  means  of  the  knowledge  of 


134  THE    TRUE    CONCEPTION 

vhe  rocks,  the  rocks  are  therefore,  and  by  necessary  conse- 
quence, the  necessary  means  of  a  safe  passage ! 

There  is  still  another  point,  the  existence  of  Satan,  or 
the  devil,  and  the  account  to  be  made  of  him,  which  is 
always  intruded  upon  discussions  of  this  nature,  and  can 
not  well  be  avoided.  God,  we  have  seen,  might  create  a 
realm  of  things  and  have  it  stand  firm  in  its  order ;  but, 
if  He  creates  a  realm  of  powers,  a  prior  and  eternal  cer- 
tainty confronts  Him,  of  their  outbreak  in  evil.  And  at 
just  this  point,  we  are  able,  it  may  be,  to  form  some  Just 
or  not  impossible  conception  of  the  diabolical  personality. 
According  to  the  Manichees  or  disciples  of  Zoroaster,  a 
doctrine  virtually  accepted  by  many  philosophers,  two 
principles  have  existed  together  from  eternity,  one  of 
which  is  the  cause  of  good  and  the  other  of  evil ;  and  by 
this  short  process  they  make  out  their  account  of  evil. 
With  sufficient  modifications,  their  account  is  probably  true. 
Thus  if  their  good  principle,  called  God  by  us,  is  taken  as 
a  being,  and  their  bad  principle  as  only  a  condition  pri- 
vative ;  one  as  a  positive  and  real  cause,  the  other  as  a  bad 
possibility  that,  environs  God  from  eternity,  waiting  to  be- 
come a  fact  and  certain  to  become  a  fact,  whenever  the 
opportunity  is  given,  it  is  even  so.  And  then  it  follows 
that,  the  moment  God  creates  a  realm  of  powers,  the  bad 
possibility  as  certainly  becomes  a  bad  actuality,  a  Satan,  or 
devil,  in  esse;  not  a  bad  omnipresence  over  against  God, 
and  His  equal — that  is  a  monstrous  and  horrible  concep- 
tion— but  an  outbreaking  evil,  or  empire  of  evil  in  created 
spirits,  according  to  their  order.  For  Satan,  or  the  devil, 
taken  in  the  singular,  is  not  the  name  of  any  particular 
person,  neither  is  it  a  personation  merely  of  temptation, 


OF    SATAN    OR    THE    DEVIL.  135 

or  impersonal  evil,  as  many  insist ;  for  there  is  really  no 
such  thing  as  impersonal  evil  in  the  sense  of  moral  evil ; 
but  the  name  is  a  name  that  generalizes  bad  persons  or 
spirits,  with  their  bad  thoughts  and  characters,  many  in 
one.  That  there  is  any  single  one  of  them  who,  by  dis- 
tinction or  pre-eminence,  is  called  Satan,  or  devil,  is 
wholly  improbable.  The  name  is  one  taken  up  by  the 
imagination  to  designate  or  embody,  in  a  conception  the 
mind  can  most  easily  wield,  the  all  or  total  of  bad  minds 
and  powers.  Even  as  Davenport,  the  ablest  theologian 
of  all  the  New  England  Fathers,  represents,  in  his  Gate  • 
chism;  answering  carefully  the  question, — "What  is  the 
devil  ?  " — thus :  "  The  multitude  of  apostate  angels  which, 
by  pride,  and  blasphemy  against  God,  and  malice  against 
man,  became  liars  and  murderers,  by  tempting  him  to  that 
sin." 

There  is  also  a  further  reason  for  this  general  unifying 
of  the  bad  powers  in  one,  or  under  one  conception,  in  the 
fact  that  evil,  once  beginning  to  exist,  inevitably  becomes 
organic,  and  constructs  a  kind  of  principate  or  kingdom 
opposite  to  God.  It  is  with  all  bad  spirits,  doubtless,  as 
with  us.  Power  is  taken  by  the  strongest,  and  weakness 
falls  into  a  subordinate  place  of  servility  and  abjectness. 
Pride  organizes  caste,  and  dominates  in  the  sphere  of  fash  • 
ion.  Corrupt  opinions,  false  judgments,  bad  manners,  and 
a  general  body  of  conventionalisms  that  represent  the 
motherhood  of  sin,  come  into  vogue  and  reign.  And  so, 
doubtless,  every  where  and  in  all  worlds,  sin  has  it  in  its 
nature  to  organize,  mount  into  the  ascendant  above  God 
and  truth,  and  reign  in  a  kingdom  opposite  to  God.  And, 
in  this  view,  evil  is  fitly  represented  in  the  scripture  as  or- 
ganizing itself  under  Satan,  or  the  devil,  or  the  prince  of 


136  THE    TRUE    CONCEPTION 

this  world,  or  the  prince  of  the  power  of  the  air; — no  pu- 
ling fiction  of  superstition,  as  many  fancy,  but,  rightly 
conceived,  a  grand,  massive,  portentous,  and  even  tremen- 
dous reality.  For  though  it  be  true  that  no  such  bad'  om 
nipresence  is  intended  in  the  term  Satan  as  some  appear  to 
fancy,  there  is  represented  in  it  an  organization  of  bad 
mind,  thought,  and  power,  that  is  none  the  less  imperial  as 
regards  resistance. 

At  just  this  point  many  fall  into  the  easy  mistake  of 
supposing  that  the  bad  organization  finds  its  head  in  a 
particular  person  or  spirit,  who  has  all  other  bad  spirits 
submissive  and  loyal  under  his  will,  and  is  called  Satan  as 
being  their  king.  But  they  press  the  analogy  too  far, 
overlooking  the  fact  that  evil  is  as  truly  and  eternally  an- 
archy as  organization.  It  is  much  better  to  understand, 
as  in  reference  to  bad  spirits,  what  we  know  holds  good  in 
respect  to  the  organic  force  of  evil  here  among  men.  Evil 
is  a  hell  of  oppositions,  riots,  usurpations,  in  itself,  and 
bears  a  front  of  organization  only  as  against  good.  It 
never  made  a  chief  that  it  would  not  shortly  dethrone, 
never  set  up  any  royal  Mmrod  or  family  of  Nimrods  it 
would  not  sometime  betray,  or  expel.  That  the  organic 
force  of  evil  therefore  has  ever  settled  the  eternal  suprema- 
cy of  some  one  spirit  called  devil,  or  Satan,  is  against  the 
known  nature  of  evil.  There  is  no  such  order,  allegiance, 
loyalty,  faith,  in  evil  as  that.  The  stability  of  Satan  and 
his  empire  consists,  not  in  the  force  of  some  personal  chief- 
tainship, but  in  the  fixed  array  of  all  bad  minds,  and  even 
of  anarchy  itself,  against  what  is  good. 

As  regards  the  naming  process  by  which  this  devil,  or 
Satan,  is  prepared,  we  may  easily  instruct  ourselves  by 
.other  analogies;  such,  for  example,  as  "the  man  of  sin," 


OF    SATAN    OR    THE    DEVIL.  137 

and  "anti-Christ."  These  are  the  names,  evidently,  of 
no  particular  person.  "  The  man  of  sin  "  is  in  fact  all  the 
men  of  sin,  or  the  spirit  that  works  in  them ;  for  the  con- 
ception is  that,  as  Christ  has  brought  forth  a  gospel,  so  it 
is  inevitable  that  sin  will  foul  that  gospel  in  the  handling, 
and  be  a  mystery  of  iniquity  upon  it.  And  this  mystery 
of  iniquity,  as  Paul  saw,  was  already  beginning  to  work, 
as  work  it  must,  till  it  is  taken  out  of  the  way.  And  this 
working  is  to  be  the  revelation  of  evil  through  the  gospel, 
and  of  the  gospel  through  evil.  It  includes  the  dogmatic 
usurpation,  the  priestly  assumptions,  the  mock  sacraments, 
and  all  the  church  idols,  brought  in  as  improvements — 
every  thing  contributed  to,  and  interwoven  with,  the  gos- 
pel, by  sin  as  a  miracle  of  iniquity.  "When  that  process  is 
carried  through,  the  gospel  will  be  understood ;  not  before. 
It  is  also  noticeable  that  what  the  devil,  or  Satan,  is  to  God 
as  a  spirit,  that  also  anti-christ  is  to  Christ,  the  incarnate 
God-man.  Anti-christ  is,  in  fact,  the  devil  of  Christianity, 
as  Satan  is  the  devil  of  the  Creation  and  Providence.  As 
the  devil  too  is  singled  out  and  made  eminent  by  the  defi- 
nite article,  so  is  anti-christ  spoken  of  in  the  singular  as 
one  person.  And  then,  again,  as  there  are  many  devils 
spoken  of,  so  also  it  is  declared  that  "now  there  are  many 
anti-christs." 

Satan  then  is  a  bad  possibility,  eternally  existing  prior 
to  the  world's  creation,  becoming,  or  emerging  there  into, 
a  bad  actuality — which  it  is  the  problem  of  Jehovah's  gov- 
ernment to  master.  For  it  has  been  the  plan  of  God,  in 
the  creation  and  training  of  the  powers,  so  to  bring  them 
on,  as  to  finally  vanquish  the  bad  possibility  or  necessity 
that  environed  Him  before  the  worlds  were  made ;  so  to 
create  and  subjugate,  or,  by  his  love,  regenerate  the  bad 

12* 


138  GOD'S    PLAN    NOT    BROKEN    UP, 

powers  loosened  by  his  act  of  creation,  as  to  have  them  in 
eternal  dominion.  And  precisely  here  is  He  seen  in  the 
grandeur  of  his  attitude.  We  might  yield  to  some  opin- 
ion of  his  weakness,  when  pondering  the  dark  fatality  by 
which  he  is  encompassed  in  the  matter  of  evil;  but  when 
we  see  his  plan  distinctly  laid,  as  a  fowler's  when  he  sets 
his  net;  that  he  is  disappointed  by  nothing,  and  that  all 
his  counsels  unfold  in  their  appointed  time  and  order,  as 
when  a  general  marches  on  his  army  in  a  course  of  vic- 
tory; that  he  sets  good  empire  against  evil  empire,  and, 
without  high  words  against  his  adversary,  calmly  proceeds 
to  accomplish  a  system  of  order  that  comprehends  the  sub- 
jugation of  disorder,  what  majesty  and  grandeur  invest 
his  person!  "Nothing  which  he  could  have  done  by  om- 
nipotence, no  silent  peace  of  compulsion,  no  unconsenting 
order  of  things,  made  fast  by  his  absolute  will,  could  have 
given  any  such  impression  of  his  greatness  and  glory,  as 
this  loosening  of  the  possibility  of  evil,  in  the  purpose 
finally  to  turn  it  about  by  his  counsel  and  transform  it  by 
his  goodness  and  patience.  What  significance  and  sub- 
limity is  there,  holding  such  a  view,  in  the  extatic  words 
of  Christ,  when  just  about  to  finish  his  work — "I  beheld 
Satan  as  lightning  fall  from  heaven!"  Nor  any  the  less 
when  his  prophet  testifies  after  him — "And  the  great 
dragon  was  cast  out,  that  old  serpent  called  the  devil  and 
Satan,  which  deceiveth  the  whole  world."  "Now  is  come 
salvation,  and  strength,  and  the  kingdom  of  our  Lord  and 
of  his  Christ," 

That  salvation,  strength,  and  kingdom,  be  it  also  ob- 
served, are  not  patches  of  mending  laid  upon  the  rent  gar- 
ment of  a  broken  plan,  but  issues  and  culminations  of  the 
eternal  plan  itself.  The  cross  of  redemption  is  no  after- 

JuteS1   » 


BUT    BEACHING    ON    TO    VICTOBY.  139 

thought,  but  is  itself  the  grand  all-dominating  idea  around 
which  the  eternal  system  of  God  crystalizes ;  Jesus  Christ, 
the  "appointed  heir  of  all  things" — "the  Lamb  slain  from 
the  foundation  of  the  world."  Here  stands  out  the  final  end 
or  cause  of  all  things,  here  emerge  the  powers  made  strong 
and  glorious.  Weak,  at  first,  unperfect,  incomplete,  they 
are  now  completed  and  glorified — complete  in  him,  who 
is  the  head  of  all  principality  and  power. 


CHAPTER  V. 

THE   FACT   OP  SIN 

WE  have  been  discussing  the  question  of  evil  as  a 
question  of  possibility,  probability,  prospect;  we  now 
come  down  to  the  question  of  fact — is  it,  or  is  it  not  a  fact 
that  sin  exists? 

But  in  passing  to  this  question,  it  appears  to  be  required 
of  us  to  state  the  object  we  have  in  it,  and  also  to  indicate, 
in  advance,  at  the  stage  we  have  now  reached,  the  course 
or  drift  of  our  argument.  We  propose  then  to  show,  first 
of  all,  the  fact  of  sin.  This  being  established,  we  shall  next 
go  into  a  computation  or  inspection  of  the  effects  of  sin, 
and  show  that  it  is  followed  and  must  be  by  a  general  dis- 
turbance or  collapse  of  nature ;  what  we  call  nature  being, 
in  fact,  a  state  of  unnature  induced  by  the  penal  or  retri- 
butive action  of  causes  provoked  by  sin.  Hence,  unless 
disorder  and  frustration  are  to  be  eternal,  a  second  higher 
movement  is  required,  having  force  to  restore  the  lapse  of 
nature;  which  higher  movement  is  the  supernatural  work 
of  grace  and  redemption.  In  this  view  the  unity  itself  of 
the  system  of  God  comprehends,  it  will  be  seen,  two  ranges 
of  existence  and  operative  force ;  nature  and  the  supernat- 
ural; both  complementary  to  each  other;  while  the  latter, 
comprising  the  powers,  and  all  divine  agencies  exerted  in 
their  restoration,  and  containing  all  the  last  ends  and  high- 
est workings  and  only  perfect  results  of  God's  plan,  is,  bj 
the  supposition,  chief  above  the  other;  having  that  to 
serve  its  uses,  and  be  the  organ  of  its  exercise.  The  crea- 
tion therefore  is  made  for  Christianity,  and  without  that, 


THE    FACT    OF    SIN.  141 

as  a  kingdom  supernatural,  the  kingdom  of  nature  is  only 
an  absurd  and  fragmentary  existence,  having  no  signifi- 
cance or  end.  The  argument  will  lead  me,  of  course,  to 
an  examination  of  some  of  the  supernatural  facts,  or  sup- 
posed facts,  of  Christianity. 

I  am  well  aware  of  the  necessary  obscurity  of  this  state- 
ment, but  as  it  is  offered  rather  to  indicate  the  course,  than 
to  convey  any  sufficient  impression,  of  the  argument  pro- 
posed, I  hope  it  may  at  least .  satisfy  the  purpose  in- 
tended. 

I  begin  then  with  the  question,  whether  it  is  a  real  and 
proper  fact  that  sin  exists?  In  discussing  this  question,  I 
abstain  altogether  from  any  close  theologic  definition  of 
sin.  Undoubtedly  there  is  a  something  called  sin  in  the 
Christian  writings,  which  is  not  action,  or  wrong-doing; 
something  not  included  in  the  Pelagian  definitions  of  sin, 
as  commonly  presented.  But  my  argument  requires  me 
to  look  no  farther  at  present  than  to  this,  which  is  the 
simplest  conception  of  the  subject;  inquiring  whether 
there  is  any  such  thing  in  the  world  as  properly  blamable 
action?  Is  there  a  transgression  of  right,  or  of  law,  a 
positive  disobedience  to  God — any  thing  that  rationally 
connects  with  remorse,  or  carries  the  sense  of  guilt  as  a  gen- 
uine reality?  Of  course  it  is  implied  that  the  transgressor 
does  what  no  mere  thing,  nothing  in  the  line  of  cause  and 
effect,  can  do — acts  against  God;  or,  what  is  nowise  differ- 
ent, against  the  constituent  harmony  of  things  issued  from 
the  will  of  God.  Hence  the  bad  conscience,  the  sense  of 
guilt  or  blame ;  that  the  wrong-doer  recognizes  in  the  act 
something  from  himself,  that  is  not  from  any  mere  princi- 
ple of  nature,  not  from  God,  contrary  to  God. 

It  appears,  in  one  view,  to  be  quite  idle  to  raise  this 


142  THE    FACT    OF    SIN 

question.  Why  should  we  undertake  the  serious  discus- 
sion of  a  question  that  every  man  has  settled ;  why  argue 
for  a  fact  that  every  man  acknowledges?  It  would  indeed 
be  quite  nugatory,  if  all  mankind  could  definitely  see 
what  they  acknowledge.  But  they  do  not,  and,  what 
is  more,  many  are  abundantly  ingenious  to  escape  doing 
it.  In  fact  all  the  naturalism  of  our  day  begins  just  here, 
in  the  denial,  or  disguised  disallowance  of  this  self-evident 
and  every  where  visible  fact,  the  existence  of  sin.  Some- 
times, where  no  such  denial  is  intended  or  thought  of,  it 
is  yet  virtually  made,  in  the  assumption  of  some  theory,  or 
supposed  principle  of  philosophy,  which,  legitimately  car- 
ried out,  conducts  and  will  conduct  other  minds  also  to  the 
formal  denial,  both  of  the  fact  of  sin,  and  of  that  respon- 
sibility which  is  its  necessary  precondition.  We  have 
thus  a  large  class  holding  the  condition  of  implicit  natural- 
ism, who  assert  what  amounts  to  a  denial  of  responsibility, 
and  so  of  the  possibility  of  sin,  without  denying  formally 
the  fact,  or  conceiving  that  any  truth  of  Christianity  as  a 
supernatural  religion  is  brought  in  question.  Of  these 
we  may  cite,  as  a  prominent  instance  and  example,  the 
phrenologists,  who  are  many  of  them  disciples  and  earnest 
advocates  of  the  Christian  doctrine.  Still  it  is  not  diffi- 
cult to  see  that,  if  human  actions  are  nothing  but  results 
brought  to  pass  or  determined,  by  the  ratios  of  so  many 
quantities  of  brain  at  given  points  under  the  skull,  then 
are  they  no  more  fit  subjects  of  reward,  or  blame,  than  the 
motions  of  the  stars,  determined  also  by  their  quantities  of 
matter.  Therefore  some  phrenologists  add  the  conception 
of  a  higher  nature  than  the  pulpy  quantities;  a  person,  a 
free-will  power,  presiding  over  them  and  only  using  them 
as  its  incentives  and  instruments,  but  never  mechanically 


OFTEN    DENIED    UNDESIGNEDL Y.  148 

determined  by  them.  This  takes  phrenology  out  of  the 
conditions  of  naturalism  and,  for  just  the  same  reasori,  and 
in  the  same  breath,  renders  sin  a  possibility ;  otherwise  the 
science,  however  fondly  accepted  as  the  ally  of  Christianity, 
(a  sorry  kind  of  ally  at  the  best,)  is  only  a  tacit  and  im- 
plicit form  of  naturalism,  that  virtually  excludes  the  faith 
of  Christianity. 

On  the  other  hand,  we  have  met  with  advocates  of  natu- 
ralism, who  have  not  been  quite  able  to  deny  the  existence 
of  sin,  or  who  even  assert  the  fact  in  ways  of  doubtful  sig- 
nificance. Thus  Mr.  Parker,  in  his  "  Discourses  of  Reli- 
gion," having  it  for  his  main  object  to  disprove  the  credi- 
bility of  miracles  and  of  every  thing  supernatural  in 
Christianity,  still  admits  in  words  the  existence  of  sin. 
He  even  accounts  it  one  of  the  merits  of  Calvinistic  and 
Lutheran  orthodoxy  that  it  "shows  (we  quote  his  own 
language,)  the  hatefulness  of  sin  and  the  terrible  evils  it 
brings  upon  the  world;"*  and,  what  is  yet  more  decisive, 
he  represents  it  as  being  one  of  the  faults  of  the  moderate 
school  of  Protestants,  that  "they  reflect  too  little  on  the 
evil  that  comes  from  violating  the  law  of  God."f  And  yet 
the  whole  matter  of  supernaturalism,  which  he  is  discussing, 
hinges  on  precisely  this  and  nothing  else;  viz.,  the  question 
whether  there  is  any  such  thing  as  a  real  "violation  of  the 
law  of  God,"  any  "hatefulness  in  sin,"  any  "terrible  evils 
brought  on  the  world "  by  means  of  it.  For  to  violate 
the  law  of  God  is  itself  an  act  supernatural,  out  of  the 
order  of  nature,  and  against  the  order  of  nature,  as  truly 
even  as  a  miracle,  else  it  is  nothing.  The  very  sin  of  the 
sin  is  that  it  is  against  God,  and  every  thing  that  comes 
from  God ;  the  acting  of  a  soul,  or  power,  against  the  con- 

*  Discourses  of  Religion,  p.  453.         f  Idem,  p.  465. 


144  AMBIGUOUS    DOCTRINE 

stituent  frame  of  nature  and  its  internal  harmony; 
followed  therefore,  as  in  due  time,  we  shall  show,  by  a 
real  disorder  of  nature,  which  nothing  but  a  supernatu- 
ral agency  of  redemption  can  ever  effectually  repair. 
Of  this,  the  fundamental  fact  on  which,  in  reality,  the 
whole  question  he  is  discussing  turns,  he  takes  no  manner 
of  notice.  Admitting  the  existence  of  sin,  his  specula- 
tions still  go  on  their  way,  as  if  it  were  a  fact  of  no  sig- 
nificance in  regard  to  his  argument.  If  he  had  sounded 
the  question  of  sin  more  deeply,  ascertaining  what  it  is 
and  what  it  involves,  he  might  well  enough  have  spared 
himself  the  labor  of  his  book.  He  either  would  never 
have  written  it  at  all,  or  else  he  would  have  denied  the 
existence  of  sin  altogether,  as  being  only  a  necessary  con- 
dition of  the  supernatural. 

And  we  are  the  more  confirmed  in  the  opinion  that  his 
denial  of  supernaturalism  begins  in  a  state  of  mental  am- 
biguity respecting  sin,  from  the  fact  that  exactly  this  am- 
biguity is  manifested  in  his  work  itself.  Thus,  when 
speaking  of  the  wrongs  and  the  oppressive  inequalities 
discovered  in  the  distributions  of  society,  he  refers  them, 
if  we  understand  him  rightly,  to  causes  in  human  nature, 
not  to  the  will,  in  its  abuse  or  breach  of  nature.  He 
says, — "We  find  the  root  of  all  in  man  himself.  In  him 
is  the  same  perplexing  antithesis  which  we  meet  in  all  his 
works.  These  conflicting  things  existed  as  ideas  in  him, 
before  they  took  their  present  concrete  shape.  Discordant 
causes  [in  his  nature  we  understand,]  have  produced 
effects  not  harmonious.  Out  of  man  these  institutions 
have  grown;  out  of  his  passions  or  his  judgment,  his 
senses  or  his  soul.  Taken  together  they  are  the  exponent 
which  indicates  the  character  and  degree  of  development 


OF    MR.    PARKER.  145 

the  race  has  now  attained."*  Out  of  his  passions  or  his 
judgment,  his  senses  or  his  soul !  Whence  then  did  they 
come?  for  this  appears  to  be  a  little  ambiguous.  And 
what  if  it  should  happen  that  they  came  out  of  neither — 
out  of  no  ground,  or  cause  in  nature  whatever,  but  out  of 
the  will  as  a  power  transcending  nature.  If  these  bitter 
wrongs  of  society,  such  as  war,  slavery,  and  the  like, 
which  Mr.  Parker  has  so  often  denounced  in  terms  so 
nearly  violent,  kindling,  as  it  were,  a  hell  of  words  in 
which  to  burn  them  before  the  time ;  if  these  bitter  wrongs 
are  nothing  but  developments  of  "  discordant  causes"  in  hu- 
man nature,  then  wherein  are  they  to  be  blamed  ?  "  Viola- 
tions of  the  law  of  God ! "  do  God's  own  causes  violate  his 
law?  Bringing  "terrible  evils  on  the  world!  "  how  upon 
the  world,  when  God  himself  has  put  the  evils  in  it,  as  truly 
as  he  has  put  the  legs  of  a  frog  in  the  tadpole  out  of  which 
it  grows.  "  Hatefulness  of  sin !  "  Is  the  mere  develop- 
ment of  God's  own  constituted  works  and  causes  hateful  ? 
Is  the  dog-star  morally  hateful  because  it  rises  in  July? 

But  the  advocates  of  naturalism  are  commonly  more 
thorough  and  consistent ;  not  consistent  with  each  other, 
that  is  too  much  to  be  expected,  but  consistent  with  them- 
selves, in  trying  each  to  find  some  way  of  disallowing  sin, 
or  so  far  explaining  it  away,  as  to  reduce  it  within  the 
terms  of  mere  cause  and  effect  in  nature.  Thus,  for 
example,  Fourier  conceives  that  what  we  call  sin,  by  a 
kind  of  misnomer,  is  predicable  only  of  society,  not  of  the 
individual  man.  Considered  as  creatures  of  God,  all  men, 
as  truly  as  the  first  man  before  sin,  have  and  continue 
always  to  have  a  right  and  perfect  nature,  in  the  same 
manner  as  the  stars.  He  accordingly  assumes  it  as  the- 

Discourses  of  Religion,  p.  12. 
13 


146  ASSUMPTION    OP    FOURIER. 

fundamental  principle  of  the  new  science  that, — "  Man's 
attractions,"  like  theirs,  "  are  proportioned  to  his  destin- 
ies ; "  so  that,  by  means  of  his  passions,  he  will  even 
gravitate  naturally  toward  the  condition  of  order  and 
well-being,  with  the  same  infallible  certainty  as  they.  It 
only  happens  that  society  is  not  £tly  organized,  and  that 
produces  all  the  mischief.  There  really  is  no  sin,  apart 
from  the  fact  that  men  have  not  had  the  science  to  organ- 
ize society  rightly.  He  does  not  appear  to  notice  the  fact 
that  if  these  human  stars,  called  men,  are  all  harmoniously 
tempered  and  set  in  a  perfect  balance  of  inward  attrac- 
tions, by  them  to  be  swayed  under  the  laws  of  cause  and 
effect,  that  fact  is  organization,  the  very  harmony  of  the 
spheres  itself.  And  then  the  assumption  that  society  is 
not  fitly  organized,  or  badly  disorganized,  is  simply 
absurd;  not  less  absurd  the  hope  that  man  is  going  to 
scheme  it  into  organization  himself.  Doubtless  society  is 
badly  enough  organized,  but  we  have  no  place  for  the  fact 
and  can  have  none  till  we  look  on  men  as  powers,  not 
under  cause  and  effect ;  capable,  in  that  manner,  of  sin, 
and  liable  to  it ;  through  the  bad  experiment  of  it,  to  be 
trained  up  into  character,  which  is  itself  the  completed 
organization  of  felicity.  Under  this  view  bad  organiza- 
tion, or  disorganization,  is  possible,  because  sin  is  possible; 
and  will  be  a  fact,  as  certainly  as  sin  is  a  fact — otherwise 
neither  possible,  nor  a  fact. 

But  as  we  are  dismissing,  in  this  manner,  the  in- 
consequent and  baseless  theory  of  Fourier,  there  comes 
up,  on  the  other  side,  exactly  opposite  to  him,  the  very 
celebrated  theologian  of  naturalism,  Dr.  Strauss,  who  in- 
verts the  main  point  of  Fourier,  charging  all  the  misdo- 
ings and  miseries  of  the  human  state,  commonly  called 


DENIAL    OF    DR.    STRAUSS.  147 

sins,  on  the  individual,  leaving  society  blameless  and  even 
perfect.  Finding  the  word  sin  asserting  a  rightful  place  in 
human  language,  he  is  not  so  unphilosophical  as  to  insist  on 
its  being  cast  out;  on  the  contrary,  he  even  speaks  of  "the 
sinfulness  of  human  nature;"  but  by  this  he  understands 
only  that  individuals  must  needs  suffer  so  much  of  per- 
sonal mischief  and  defect,  in  a  way  of  carrying  on  the 
historic  development  of  the  race.  In  this  view  he  says, — 
"  Humanity  \i.  e.  taken  as  a  whole,]  is  the  sinless  exist- 
ence ;  for  the  course  of  its  development  is  a  blameless  one ; 
pollution  cleaves  to  the  individuals  only,  and  does  not 
touch  the  race  and  its  history."  "  Sinful  human  nature  " 
turns  out,  in  this  manner,  to  be  the  "  sinless  existence." 
The  individuals  whom  we  call  "  sinners "  and  regard  as 
under  "pollution"  are  yet  seen  to  be  "blameless"  sinners; 
so  ingeniously  "  polluted  "  that  the  pollution  which  infects 
all  the  individuals  does  not  once  touch  the  race !  If  there 
be  any  miracle  in  supernaturalism  more  wonderful  than 
this,  let  us  be  informed  where  it  is.  The  truth  appears  to 
be  that  Dr.  Strauss  could  not  formally  deny  the  fact  of 
sin,  and  yet  had  no  place  for  it.  He  threw  it,  therefore, 
into  a  limbo  of  ambiguities,  where  he  could  recognize  it 
as  a  fact,  and  yet  make  nothing  of  it. 

Still  there  is  so  much  of  ingenuity  in  this  method  of 
getting  rid  of  sin,  the  absurdity  of  it  is  disguised  under  so 
fine  a  show  of  philosophy,  that  much  weaker  and  less  cul- 
tivated men  than  Dr.  Strauss  anticipated  him  in  it,  and, 
without  knowing,  as  well  as  he,  what  their  wise  saying 
meant,  were  as  greatly  pleased  as  he  with  the  plausible  air 
of  it.  Pope  rhymes  it  thus,  a  hundred  ways,  that, — 

"  Respecting  man,  whatever  wrong  we  call 
May,  must  be  right,  as  relative  to  all." 


148  THE    POPULAR    LITERATURE. 

The  popular  literature  of  our  time,  represented  by  such 
writers  as  Carlyle  and  Emerson,  is  in  a  similar  vein ;  not 
always  denying  sin,  for  to  lose  it  would  be  to  lose  the  spice 
and  spirit  of  half  their  representations  of  humanity;  but 
contriving  rather  to  exalt  and  glorify  it,  by  placing  both 
it  and  virtue  upon  the  common  footing  of  a  natural  use 
and  necessity.  Glorifying  also  themselves  in  the  plausi- 
ble audacity  of  their  offense;  for  it  is  one  of  the  frequent 
infirmities  of  literature  that  it  courts  effect  by  taking  on 
the  airs  of  licentiousness. 

But  this  kind  of  originality  has  now  come  to  its  limit 
or  point  of  reaction;  for,  when  licentiousness  becomes  a. 
theory,  regularly  asserted,  and  formally  vindicated,  it  is 
then  no  better  than  truth.  The  poetry  is  gone,  and  it  dies 
of  its  own  flatness.  Thus  we  have  seen  a  volume  recently 
issued  from  the  American  press,  the  formal  purpose  of 
which  is  to  show,  even  as  a  Christian  fact,  the  blameless- 
ness  of  sin ;  nay  more,  that  the  main  object  of  Jesus  Christ 
in  his  mission  of  love,  is  to  disabuse  the  world  of  the  im- 
posture, deliver  it  of  the  terrible  nightmare  of  sin.  Not 
to  deliver  it  of  sin  itself — that  is  a  mistake — but  to  deliver 
it  of  the  conviction  of  sin,  as  an  illusive  and  baleful  mis- 
take gendered  by  the  superstition  of  the  world!  If  any 
thing  can  be  taken  for  a  certain  proof  that  mankind 
are  infatuated  by  some  strange  illusion,  such  as  sin  alone 
may  breed,  it  would  seem  to  be  the  fact  itself  that  they  are 
able  to  impose  upon  themselves  and  one  another,  by  these 
feeble  perversities  that,  despite  of  all  the  best  known, 
best  attested  facts  of  life,  contrive  to  put  on  still  the  airs 
of  science  and  maintain  the  pretences  of  reason. 


Passing  on  from  these  oppositions  of  science,  falsely 


so 


APPEAL    TO    OBSERVATION".  149 

called,  let  us  refer  to  some  of  the  formal  proofs  that  sin  is 
an  existing  fact.  Scripture  authority  is  out  of  the  ques- 
tion, which  we  do  not  regret;  for  the  practical  and  palpa- 
ble evidences  that  meet  us  in  the  simple  inspection  of  hu- 
manity itself  are  abundantly  sufficient. 

The  question  here,  it  will  be  observed,  is  not  whether 
men  are  totally  depraved,  or  depraved  at  all;  nor  whether 
they  sin  continually;  but  simply  whether  they  do  actual- 
ly sin? — whether,  in  fact,  sin  exists?  Nor  is  it  implied 
that  all  sins  are  equally  blamable;  for,  beyond  a  question, 
great  numbers  of  persons  are  steeped  in  contaminating  in- 
fluences from  their  earliest  childhood,  and  pass  into  life 
under  the  heaviest  loads  of  moral  disadvantage.  Kegard- 
ing  their  acts,  nothing  is  sin  to  such,  but  what  they  do  as 
sin.  The  object  we  have  in  view  is  sufficiently  answered 
by  the  adequate  proof  of  a  single  sin;  for  the  argument  of 
naturalism  goes  the  length  of  denying  all  sin,  even  the 
possibility  of  sin ;  so  that  if  one  man  is  able,  as  a  power, 
to  break  out  of  nature  and  do  a  sin  against  it,  the  whole 
theory  is  dissolved.  The  power  of  liberty  that  can  do  one 
sin,  can  do  more ;  and  if  only  one  man  has  it,  he  must 
either  be  a  miracle  himself,  or  else  other  men  can  do  the 
same. 

"We  begin  with  an  appeal  to  observation,  alledging  as  a 
fact  that  we  do,  by  inevitable  necessity,  impute  blame  to 
acts  of  injury  done  us  by  others.  We  can  as  easily  avoid 
making  a  shadow  in  the  sun,  as  we  can  avoid  a  sentiment 
of  blame,  when  we  are  designedly  injured  by  a  fellow 
man.  "We  do  it,  not  as  a  pettish  child  may  pelt  a  thistle 
on  which  he  has  trodden,  not  in  any  dispossessed  state  or 
momentary  fit  of  anger,  but  even  after  years  of  reflection 

13* 


150  APPEAL    TO    OBSERVATION.' 

have  passed  away ;  nay,  after  we  have  bathed  the  wrong 
done  us,  for  so  long  a  time,  in  the  cleansing  waters  of  for- 
giveness. Still  we  condemn  the  wrong  and  must,  as  long 
as  we  exist;  our  forgiveness  itself  implies  that  we  do;  for 
.what  is  there  to  be  forgiven,  if  there  be  nothing  that  we 
condemn  ?  Thus,  if  there  be  two  partners  in  trade,  and 
one  of  them  absconds  with  all  the  profits  and  funds  of  the 
establishment,  leaving  the  other,  with  his  family,  victims  to 
the  common  liabilities,  and  to  a  necessary  doom,  for  life,  of 
poverty ;  by  what  art  can  either  he,  or  they,  ever  manage 
to  eradicate  their  sense  of  wrong,  or  the  blame  they  im- 
pute to  the  perfidious  man  whose  crime  has  been  the  de- 
spoiler  of  their  life  ?  They  may  forgive  him,  they  may  fol- 
low him  with  their  prayers  to  the  hour  of  his  last  breath,  but 
they  will  pray  as  for  a  guilty  man,  whose  crime  is  the  bit- 
terness of  his  life,  as  it  has  been  the  burden  of  theirs. 

Suppose  now  they  turn  philosophers  and  make  the  dis- 
covery that  there  is  no  sin,  that  all  actions  take  place  un- 
der the  necessary  law  of  cause  and  effect,  and  manage  to 
smooth  over,  with  this  fine  apology,  all  the  crimes  they 
hear  of  in  the  world ;  still  that  one  man  that  robbed  them 
of  their  all — how  stubborn  a  fact  is  he,  how  unreduci- 
ble  to  their  theory !  His  very  name  means  all  that  sin 
ever  means,  and  they  can  as  easily  tear  out  their  own 
heart-strings,  as  they  can  empty  that  name  of  the  blame  it 
signifies. 

Or  suppose  a  man  writes  a  book,  the  precise  object  of 
which  is  to  show  that  there  is,  and  can  be  no  such  thing 
as  sin,  and  then  that  his  work  is  assaulted,  as  he  thinks, 
with  unfair  representations  and  malicious  constructions, 
what  will  you  more  certainly  see,  than  that  he  is  out  im- 
mediately against  his  accusers,  in  the  most  violent  denun- 


APPEAL    TO    CONSCIOUSNESS.  151 

ciations  of  their  bigotry,  and  the  wicked  untruths  of  their 
criticism.  Now,  if  the  book  was  true,  if  there  is  no  sin 
that  is  blamable,  what  have  they  done  to  be  so  bitterly 
blamed?  What  they  have  done  is  simply  natural,  and  is 
no  more  to  be  condemned  than  a  frosty  night.  It  will  no- 
wise diminish  the  force  of  our  supposition  to  add  that  it 
might  well  enough  be  given  as  historic  fact.  In  which, 
also,  we  may  see  how  certainly  every  man's  rational  and 
moral  instincts  will  triumph,  after  all,  over  his  theories  and 
formal  arguments,  when  he  undertakes  to  deny  or  dis- 
prove the  fact  of  sin. 

We  go  farther.  So  confident  are  we  in  this  matter  that, 
if  there  be  any  man  living  who  undertakes  to  be  consist- 
ent in  the  denial  of  sin,  setting  it  down  however  firmly,  as 
a  point  of  will,  never  to  blame  any  injury  done  to  others 
or  to  himself,  we  will  engage,  in  case  he  is  able  to  spend 
four  waking  hours  without  any  single  thought  or  feeling 
of  blame  as  against  any  human  creature,  to  admit  the 
truth  of  his  doctrine. 

We  have  another  proof,  in  the  fact  that  we  as  positively 
and  necessarily  blame  ourselves ;  not  in  every  thing — my 
argument  does  not  require  me  to  go  that  length — enough 
that  we  do  it  on  particular  occasions,  distinctly  noted  and 
remembered.  And  here  we  are  bold  to  affirm  that  every 
person  of  a  mature  age,  and  in  his  right  mind,  remembers 
turns,  or  crises  in  his  life,  where  he  met  the  question  of 
wrong  face  to  face,  and  by  a  hard  inward  struggle  broke 
through  the  sacred  convictions  of  duty  that  rose  up  to 
fence  him  back.  It  was  some  new  sin  to  which  he  had  not 
become  familiar,  so  much  worse  perhaps  in  degree  as  to  be 
the  entrance  to  him  consciously  of  a  new  stage  of  guilt. 


152  APPEAL    TO    CONSCIOUSNESS. 

He  remembers  how  it  shook  his  soul  and  even  his  body ; 
how  he  shrunk  in  guilty  anticipation  from  the  new  step 
of  wrong;  the  sublime  misgiving  that  seized  him,  the 
awkward  and  but  half-possessed  manner  in  which  it  was 
taken,  and  then  afterward,  perhaps  even  after  years  have 
passed  away,  how,  in  some  quiet  hour  of  the  day  or  wake- 
ful hour  of  night,  as  the  recollection  of  that  deed — not  a 
public  crime,  but  a  wrong,  or  an  act  of  vice — returned 
upon  him,  the  blood  rushed  back  for  the  moment  on  his 
fluttering  heart,  the  pores  of  his  skin  opened,  and  a  kind 
of  agony  of  shame  and  self-condemnation,  in  one  word, 
of  remorse,  seized  his  whole  person.  This  is  the  conscious- 
ness, the  guilty  pang,  of  sin ;  every  man  knows  what  it  is. 

We  have  also  observed  this  peculiarity  in  such  experi- 
ences ;  that  it  makes  no  difference  at  all  what  temptations 
we  were  under;  we  probably  enough  do  not  eve!n  think 
of  them;  our  soul  appears  to  scorn  apology,  as  if  some 
higher  nature  within,  speaking  out  of  its  eternity,  were 
asserting  its  violated  rights,  chastising  the  insult  done  to 
its  inborn  affinities  with  immutable  order  and  divinity, 
and  refusing  to  be  farther  humbled  by  the  low  pleadings 
of  excuse  and  disingenuous  guilt.  To  say,  at  such  a  time, 
the  woman  tempted  me,  I  was  weak,  I  was  beguiled,  I 
was  compelled  by  fear  and  overcome,  signifies  nothing. 
The  wrong  was  understood,  and  that  suffices. 

Nor  is  it  only  in  these  times  of  conscious  compunction 
that  we  are  seen  to  blame  ourselves  as  transgressors.  We 
do  it  tacitly  or  unconsciously,  in  ways  that  are  even  more 
striking.  Thus  it  may  be  seen  that  large  assemblies  of 
men,  not  the  worst  of  their  species,  not  the  ignorant  or  the 
broken  spirited  victims  of  depression,  not  the  felons  or 
outcasts  of  society,  but  the  most  intelligent,  most  honest 


APPEAL    TO    CONSCIOUSNESS.  153 

and  honorable,  and  generally  most  exemplary  as  regards 
their  conduct,  will  come  together  once  in  seven  days,  and 
sit  down  to  the  exposure  and  charge  of  their  sin,  without 
even  a  thought  of  offense  or  insult.  And  what  is  more, 
that  kind  of  preaching  which  probes  them  most  faithfully, 
and  most  disturbs  their  consciences,  will  most  invite  their 
attendance,  if  only  there  is  no  violence,  or  fanaticism  in 
the  manner.  Any  sober  and  rational  exposure  of  their 
sin,  however  piercing,  they  will  submit  to,  take  it  as  their 
privilege,  and  pay  for  it  cheerfully,  year  by  year!  Why 
now  is  this?  Simply  because  they  are  sinners  and  know 
the  charge  to  be  true.  "Were  they  charged  in  this  manner 
with  being  thieves,  pickpockets,  or  assassins,  all  husbands 
and  wives  arraigned  as  false,  all  children  as  parricides,  all 
citizens  as  perjurers  and  traitors,  all  merchants  and  bank- 
ers as  'dishonest  and  fraudulent  dealers,  they  would  in- 
stantly repel  the  charge ;  their  indignation  could  not  be 
restrained  for  a  moment.  Nor  is  it  any  thing  to  say  that 
they  have  been  educated  into  the  faith  that  they  are  trans- 
gressors, living  in  the  guilt  of  sin,  and  submit  to  the  charge 
as  to  one  of  their  superstitions.  It  is  not  as  being  a  dog- 
ma that  the  charge  has  any  reality  to  them ;  indeed  they 
often  repel  it  as  such  and  deny  it.  It  has  never  any  pow- 
er, till  it  is  wielded  in  such  a  manner  as  to  stir  the  con- 
sciousness, and  draw  out  thence  a  fresh  verdict  of  convic- 
tion. 

We  do  then  blame  ourselves.  It  is  one  of  the  most  real 
and  tremendous  facts  of  our  consciousness;  which,  if  a 
man  will  seek  to  explain  away,  by  resolving  it  into  cause 
and  effect,  it  will  yet  remain,  defying  and  scorning  all  his 
arguments.  He  knows  that  he  himself  did  the  sin,  and  no 
cause  bark  of  himself.  It  is  a  fact,  self-pronounced  in  his 


154:  OUR    INDICATIONS    SHOW 

consciousness,  and  of  which  he  can  no  more  divest  him- 
self than  he  can  stay  the  consciousness  of  his  existence. 
Chloroform  may  rid  him  of  it,  but  not  argument. 

Again,  it  is  a  fact  constantly  perceived  that,  where 
men  do  not  occupy  themselves  with  thoughts  of  blame, 
or  conscious  admissions  of  guilt,  they  are  yet  exercised  in 
ways  that  imply  it,  and  prove  it  only  the  more  convinc- 
ingly. The  moment  we  look  out  upon  the  race,  and 
take  note  of  mankind,  as  revealed  in  their  most  super- 
ficial demonstrations,  we  discover  that  they  are  out  of  rest, 
plagued  by  the  foul  demon  of  guilt.  A  malefactor  aspect 
invests  their  conduct.  Not  by  altars  only  of  sacrifice, 
smoking  under  every  sky ;  not  by  pilgrimages,  abstinenc- 
es, vigils,  flagellations  of  the  body,  self-immolations,  and 
other  voluntary  tortures ;  not  by  the  giving  way  even  of 
natural  afiection  before  this  dreadful  horror  of  the  mind, 
yielding  up  the  children  of  the  body  to  pacify  the  sins  of 
the  soul — not  by  these  misdirected  expedients  and  pains 
of  guilt  alone  do  we  discover  its  existence,  but  by  others, 
more  silent  and  convincing. 

Take,  for  a  single  example,  the  remarkable  fact  of  a  uni- 
versal shyness  of  God — a  fact  conceded  by  society,  and 
made  the  basis  even  of  a  common  law  of  politeness. 
Why  is  this,  why  is  it  accepted  as  a  universal  law  of  po- 
liteness, never  to  obtrude  upon  others  the  subject  of  re- 
ligion, or  of  God  and  the  soul,  without  some  previous 
intimation  or  discovery  that  the  subject  will  not  be  un- 
welcome. Because  it  is  presumed  not  to  be  welcome.  It 
is  not  because  God  and  the  soul  are  questionable  realities — 
we  love  to  converse  of  things  unreal,  or  imaginary,  as  well 
as  of  those  which  are  real.  It  is  not  because,  being  real, 


THE    CONSCIOUSNESS    OF    SIN.  155 

they  are  matters  about  which  there  are  many  different 
opinions — so  there  are  about  politics,  literature,  philoso- 
phy, science,  art,  and  almost  every  other  subject.  It  is 
not  because,  being  real,  God  is  not  the  loftiest,  purest  and, 
in  himself,  most  ennobling,  most  inspiring,  most  radiant 
subject  of  communication;  his  government  the  richest 
fountain  of  wisdom ;  and  the  soul  an  interest  to  itself  that 
dwarfs  all  others.  Neither  is  it  because  a  population  of 
pure,  angelic  intelligences,  occupying  this  same  world  of 
ours,  and  immersed  in  similar  employments,  would  not 
meet  the  vision  of  God  in  all  his  works,  and  would  not 
hasten  to  refresh  themselves  in  these  transcendent  themes. 
The  only  and  true  explanation  is  that  God  and  the  soul 
are  themes  that  move  disturbance.  They  suggest  blame, 
they  lacerate,  in  this  manner,  the  comfort  of  the  mind. 
So  well  understood  is  it  that  mankind  are  shy  of  God, 
and  that  humanity  is  itself  the  sign  of  a  bad  conscience, 
that  it  is  tacitly  voted  and  becomes  an  accepted  law  of 
politeness,  never  to  approach  this  one  proscribed  subject, 
without  a  previous  discovery  that  it  can  be  done  without 
offense. 

Nor  is  it  any  excuse  or  clearance  of  the  sign,  to  say  that 
manifestly  such  subjects  ought  not  to  be  promiscuously 
spoken  of  in  all  places  and  circles.  This  we  admit.  Still 
the  question  is,  why  they  may  not?  And  the  only  an 
swer  is,  that  which  we  have  given ;  that  men  are  under  a 
subtle  and  tacit,  but  damning  sense  of  blame,  and  can  not 
bear,  on  all  occasions,  or  any  where  but  in  the  public  as- 
semblies of  religion,  to  have  subjects  introduced  that  re- 
mind them  of  it,  and  stir  again  the  guilt  of  their  conscience. 
There  would  never  be  any  such  places  or  occasions,  in  a 
population  of  sinless  beings. 


156  WE    ACT    ON    THE    ASSUMPTION 

Is  this  tacit  blame  then,  that  appears  to  haunt  the  world 
and  drive  it  from  its  rest,  a  mere  fiction?  Are  we  still 
under  cause  and  effect,  as  truly  as  a  river  flowing  toward 
the  ocean,  only  not  able  ourselves  to  discover  the  fact? 
Bitter  hardship,  that  we  can  not  be  allowed  the  placidity 
of  the  river! 

We  have  yet  another  proof,  in  the  fact  that  mankind 
are  seen  to  be  acting  universally  on  the  assumption,  that 
wrong  is  done,  or  is  likely  to  be  done  in  the  world.  Every 
man  of  business,  having  only  ordinary  intelligence,  as- 
sumes it  as  a  point  of  natural  discretion,  that  he  is  beset 
with  wrong-doers,  who  will  take  every  advantage  and 
seize  every  opportunity,  and  holds  it  as  a  first  maxim  tc 
trust  no  man,  till  he  has  somehow  given  a  title  to  confi 
dence.  Not  that  men  are  generally  weak,  and  prone  to 
what  is  miscalled  wrong,  by  reason  of  their  natural  infirmi- 
ty. Contrary  to  this,  it  is  the  very  point  of  his  concern, 
that  they  are  so  capable  and  so  ready  to  be  wicked  in  the 
use  of  their  capacity.  The  smallest  part  of  his  concern  is 
to  look  out  for  such  as  may  fail  him  by  their  lack  of  ener- 
gy or  talent,  and  these  are  a  class  by  themselves.  To 
guard  against  the  others  is  his  principal  study,  and  they 
are  so  many,  so  greedy,  and  plausible,  and  false,  and  hasten 
to  the  prey  by  so  many  methods,  that  his  only  safety  is  in 
the  presumption  that  every  man  will  take  advantage  and 
do  him  a  wrong  if  he  can. 

So,  in  what  is  called  family  government,  every  thing  is 
set  upon  a  footing  that  anticipates  wrong.  Otherwise  we 
might  exist  in  a  family  state  and  never  hear  or  think  of 
a  government  as  pertaining  to  it,  any  more  than  we  now 
do  of  a  government  in  the  garden,  to  preside  over  the 


THAT    WRONGS    AEE    A    GKEAT    PERIL       157 

conduct  of  the  flowers.  Indeed,  if  there  is  no  danger  of 
wrong-doing  in  children,  the  forming  of  perverse  tempers, 
the  indulgence  of  wicked  passions,  the  breaking  down,  by 
wills  unchastened,  of  all  sacred  principles,  why  not  suffer 
them  to  unfold  naturally,  as  the  flowers  do ;  for  even  in- 
experience and  neglect  will  as  certainly  blossom  into  vir- 
tue, if  virtue  it  can  be  called,  as  they  into  their  own 
odors  and  colors.  Contrary  to  this,  we  assume  the  need  of 
government,  that  is  of  authority,  command,  correction, 
that  the  beginnings  of  evil  may  be  checked,  and  principles 
of  virtue  established.  Doubtless  there  is  such  a  thing  as 
unrighteous  and  barbarous  severity  practiced  in  the  nnme 
of  government ;  still  there  must  be  government;  for  what- 
ever parent  undertakes  to  act  on  the  assumption  that  the 
misdoing  will  be  only  mistake,  or  inexperience,  and  no 
intended  or  blamable  wrong,  (as  we  understand  some  are 
now  doing,  in  order  to  justify  their  theories,)  will  assured- 
ly find  that  something  comes  to  pass,  in  the  history  of 
their  children,  that  is  a  great  deal  more  like  wrong  than 
they  could  wish ! 

Why,  again,  do  we  organize  the  civil  state,  why  fence 
about  society  with  laws,  enforcing  them  by  severe  and 
even  sanguinary  punishments?  If  there  is  no  blamable 
wrong  in  the  world  or  danger  of  any,  why  so  careful  to 
defend  ourselves  against  what  our  laws,  by  a  mistake,  call 
wrongs,  or  crimes ;  such  as  frauds,  forgeries,  robberies,  vi- 
olations of  liberty,  character  and  chastity,  murders,  assas- 
sinations? Why  these  manifold  acts  of  penal  legislation 
against  wrong-doing,  if  wrong,  as  a  matter  of  blame,  is 
out  of  the  question,  or  if  nothing  has  ever  occurred  in 
the  world  to  suggest  the  fact,  and  discover  the  danger  of 
wrong?  The  answer  to  all  this  will  be,  that  what  we 

14 


158  TO    OUK    EXISTENCE. 

call  wrong,  in  this  manner,  is  public  evil,  and  must  be 
restrained,  but  still  is  not  really  blamable,  because  it 
takes  place  under  laws  of  nature,  and  by  natural  neces- 
sity. Are  we  then  expecting,  in  this  manner,  to  punish 
and  put  a  stop  to  the  laws  of  nature?  and  so  to  perform, 
by  legislation,  the  miracles  we  deny  in  our  arguments? 
What  means  this  array  of  courts,  constables,  and  marshals, 
the  grated  prisons,  the  hurdles  and  scaffolds,  the  solemn 
farce  of  trials  and  penal  sentences?  Are  they  simply 
barriers  or  institutes  of  defense,  in  which  we  array  causes 
against  the  harmful  action  of  other  causes,  as  the  Hol- 
landers raise  dykes  against  the  sea?  Then  why  do  we 
call  this  "criminal  law?"  and  why  has  it  never  occurred 
to  the  Hollanders  to  conceive  that  their  dykes  are  raised 
against  the  criminal  misdoings  of  the  sea? 

Besides  we  are  afraid  even  of  the  law ;  trying,  by  every 
method  possible,  to  invent  checks  and  balances  against  usur- 
pations and  abuses  of  power ;  so  to  make  power  responsi- 
ble, and  to  hedge  about  even  our  tribunals  of  justice  by  pe- 
nal enactments  against  bribery,  connivance,  and  arbitrary 
contempt  of  law;  as  if  wanting  still  some  defense  against 
even  our  defenders,  and  the  more  terrible  wrongs  they 
are  like  to  perpetrate,  in  the  abuse  of  those  powers  which 
have  been  committed  to  their  hands.  And  then,  again, 
when  the  people,  groaning  for  long  years  under  the  mis- 
rule of  a  tyrant,  rise  up  against  him,  instigated  by  the  woes 
they  have  suffered,  and  pluck  him  down  from  his  throne, 
bring  him  to  solemn  trial  and  sentence  him  to  die,  do  they 
lay  no  blame  on  his  head,  or  do  they  only  cut  off  the  thing, 
as  the  blameless  impediment  to  their  rights  and  liberties? 

"We  perceive,  in  this  manner,  how  the  whole  superstruct- 
ure of  the  civil  order  rests  on  the  conviction  that  sin  is  in 


FORGIVENESS    SUPPOSES    SIN.  159 

the  world.  "We  assume  it  as  a  fact,  the  terrible  fact,  of  hu- 
man existence.  No  one  doubts  it,  save  here  and  there 
some  busy  Sophist,  who  thinks  to  hold  his  theories  against 
all  fact  and  experience,  and  against  the  spontaneous,  practi- 
cal judgments  of  the  race — protected,  while  he  does  it,  in 
the  very  liberty  of  his  mind,  and  the  life  of  his  body,  by  laws 
that,  under  his  theories,  might  as  well  set  themselves  to 
forbid  the  fermentation  of  substances,  or  to  arraign  and 
punish  the  poisonous  growth  of  vegetables. 

We  have  still  another  class  of  proofs,  that  are  more  sub- 
tle and  closer  to  what  may  be  called  the  latent  sense  of  the 
soul;  and,  for  just  that  reason,  as  much  more  convincing, 
when  once  they  are  brought  into  the  light;  we  speak  of 
certain  sentiments  that  appear  to  be  universal,  and  the 
natural  validity  of  which  we  never  suspect. 

Take,  for  a  first  example,  the  sentiment  or  virtue  of  for- 
giveness. Does  any  one  doubt  the  reality  of  forgiveness? 
does  any  one  refuse  to  commend  forgiveness  as  a  necessary 
and  even  noble  virtue?  Forgiveness  to  what?  Forgive- 
ness to  cause  and  effect,  forgiveness  to  the  weather,  for- 
giveness to  the  mildew,  or  the  fly  that  brings  the  blasted 
harvest?  No!  forgiveness  to  wrong,  blamable  and  guilty 
wrong.  Forgiveness  and  wrong  are  relative  terms.  If 
there  is  nothing  to  blame — there  is  nothing  to  forgive. 
One  of  two  things,  then,  must  be  true ;  either  that  there 
has  been  some  blamable  wrong  in  the  world,  or  else  that  the 
forgiveness  we  think  of,  speak  of,  inculcate,  and  commend, 
is  a  baseless  phantom,  out  of  all  reality,  as  destitute  of 
dignity  and  beauty  as  of  solidity  and  truth.  Indeed,  there 
is  no  place  in  human  language  for  the  word,  any  more 
than  for  the  naming  of  a  sixth  sense  that  does  not  exist. 


160  SATIKE    AND    TRAGEDY 

The  pleasure  we  take  in  satire,  may  be  cited  as  another 
example.  This  pleasure  consists  in  cauterizing,  or  seeing 
cauterized  by  wit,  the  perverse  follies,  the  abortive  pride, 
or  the  absurd  airs  and  manners  of  such  as  morally  de- 
serve this  kind  of  treatment.  Satire  supposes  a  free  and  re- 
sponsible subject,  who  might  be  seriously  blamed,  but  can  be 
more  efficiently  treated  by  this  lighter  method,  which,  in- 
stead of  denouncing  the  guilt,  plays  off  the  absurdities,  and 
mocks  the  sorry  figure  of  sin.  Satire  supposes  demerit,  or  a 
blamable  defect  of  virtue ;  and,  where  the  mark  is  too  high 
to  be  reached  by  rebuke  or  civil  indictment,  even  crime 
may  be  fitly  chastised  by  it.  The  point  to  be  distinctly 
noted  is,  that  there  is  no  place  for  satire,  and  we 
have  no  sympathy  with  it,  except  where  there  is,  or  is  sup- 
posed to  be,  some  kind  of  moral  delinquency  or  ill  desert. 
No  poet  thinks  to  satirize  the  sea,  or  a  snow  storm,  or  a 
club  foot,  or  a  monkey,  or  a  fool.  But  he  takes  a  man,  a 
sinning  man,  who  has  deformed  himself  by  his  excesses, 
perversities,  or  crimes,  and  against  him  invokes  the  terri- 
ble Nemesis  of  wit  and  satire.  Regarding  him  simply  as 
a  thing,  under  the  laws  of  cause  and  effect,  we  should  have 
as  little  satisfaction  or  pleasure  in  the  infliction,  as  if  it 
were  laid  upon  a  falling  body. 

We  have  yet  another  and  sublimer  illustration,  in  the 
abysses  of  the  tragic  sentiment — that  which  imparts  an 
interest  so  profound  to  human  history,  to  the  novel  and 
the  drama,  and  even  to  the  crucifixion  of  Jesus  himself. 
The  staple  matter  of  emotion,  all  that  so  profoundly  moves 
our  feeling  in  these  records  of  fact  and  fiction,  is  that  here 
we  look  upon  the  conflict  of  good  and  bad  powers,  the 
glory  and  suffering  of  one,  the  hellish  art  and  malice  of 
the  other,  followed  or  not  followed  by  the  sublime  vindica- 


SUPPOSE    THE    FACT    OF    SIN.  161 

tions  of  providential  justice.  It  is  the  war,  actual  or  im- 
agined, of  beauty  and  deformity,  good  and  evil,  in  their 
higher  examples.  In  this  view,  we  have  a  deeper  sense 
of  awe,  a  vaster  movement  of  feeling,  in  the  contempla- 
tion of  a  man,  a  mere  human  creature,  in  a  character  de- 
monized  by  passion,  than  we  have  in  the  rage  of  the  sea,  or 
the  bursting  fire-storm  of  a  volcano;  because  we  regard 
him  as  a  power — a  bad  will  doing  battle  with  God  and  the 
world.  Be  it  a  Macbeth,  an  Othello,  a  Eichard,  a  Faust, 
a  Napoleon,  or  only  the  Jew  Fagin,  we  follow  him  to  his 
end,  quivering  as  under  some  bad  spell,  only  then  to  breathe 
again  with  freedom,  when  the  storm  of  his  destiny  is  over, 
and  the  wild,  fiery  mystery  that  struggled  in  his  passion  is 
solved.  But  suppose  it  were  to  come  to  us,  in  the  heat 
of  our  tragic  exaltation,  as  a  real  conviction,  that  these 
characters  are,  after  all,  only  natural  effects,  mere  frictions 
of  things,  acting  from  no  free  power  in  themselves ;  forth- 
with, at  the  instant,  every  feeling  of  interest  vanishes,  and 
we  care  no  more  for  their  petty  tumults  than  we  do  for  the 
effervescence  of  a  salt,  or  the  skim  that  mantles  a  pool. 
All  tragic  movement  ceases  when  the  powers  make  their 
exit;  for,  if  now  we  call  them  men,  they  yet  are  only 
things,  like  Lion,  Wall,  and  Moonshine,  left  to  fill  the 
stage  with  their  absurd  mockeries.  What  means  it  now 
for  the  Lady  Macbeth  to  be  crying  to  the  blood, — "  Out, 
damned  spot !  "  if  there  is  no  longer  any  such  thing  as  a 
damned  spot  of  guilt  in  her  murderous  soul.  Expunge 
the  faith  of  that,  and  the  rage  of  her  remorse  turns  at  once 
to  comedy — that,  and  nothing  more. 

Now,  in  these  and  other  like  sentiments,  constantly 
brought  into  play,  spontaneous,  clear  of  all  affectation, 
never  questioned  as  absurdities  or  fictions,  we  encounter 

14* 


162  MISDIRECTION,    NO    TRU.E 

some  of  the  sublimest,  most  irresistible  evidences  that  men 
are  capable  of  sin  and  are  in  it.  If  it  is  not  so,  then  it  is 
very  clear  that  all  the  deepest  sentiments  of  the  human 
bosom  are  only  impostures  of  natural  weakness,  destitute 
of  dignity  as  of  truth. 

It  remains  to  add  that  the  objections  offered  to  disprove 
the  existence  of  sin,  and  the  solutions  of  what  is  called  sin, 
advanced  by  the  naturalists,  are  insufficient  and  futile,  aad 
even  imply  the  fact  itself.  Most  of  these  have  been 
already  answered  in  the  course  of  our  argument — such  as 
that  the  acting  of  a  creature  against  God  is  inconceivable ; 
for  such  a  capacity  was  shown  to  be  included  in  the  very 
conception  of  a  free  agent,  or  power ; — that  if  God  really 
desires  no  sin,  he  has  all  force  to  prevent  it ;  for  a  power, 
it  was  shown,  is  not  immediately  controllable  by  force ; — 
that  sin  supposes  a  breach  of  God's  system ;  for  his  sys- 
tem is  a  system,  we  have  seen,  not  of  things,  but  of  pow- 
ers, and  maintains  the  organic  nisus  of  its  aim  as  perfectly 
among  the  discords  it  has  undertaken  to  reduce  and 
assimilate,  as  if  no  act  of  discord  had  occurred.  Mean- 
time it  will  be  seen  that  the  notion  of  evil,  most  commonly 
advanced  by  the  naturalizing  skeptics,  is  one  that  really  in- 
volves and  admits  the  guilt  of  sin,  even  though  advanced  to 
clear  it  of  the  element  of  guilt.  "Misdirection"  is  the  word 
they  apply — they  call  it  misdirection — and  in  this,  or 
something  answering  to  this,  they  universally  agree.  Even 
where  there  is  only  a  partially  developed  system  of  natu- 
ralism, and  the  existence  of  sin  is  not  formally  denied,  a 
certain  affinity  for  this  word  will  be  discovered.  Thus 
Mr.  Parker,  speaking  of  piracy,  war,  and  the  slave  trade, 
suggests  that  these  and  similar  evils  are  wrongs  that  come 


SYNONYM    OF    SIN.  163 

of  the  "abuse,  misdirection,  and  disease  of  human  na- 
ture."* This  word  misdirection  has  the  advantage  that  it 
slips  all  recognition  of  blame  or  responsibility,  because  it 
brings  into  view  no  real  agency  or  responsible  agent. 
And  hence  it  becomes  a  favorite  word,  and  is  formally 
proposed  by  many  advocates  of  naturalism,  as  the  philo- 
sophic synonym  of  sin. 

Be  it  so  then,  put  it  down  as  agreed,  that  sin  is  misdi- 
rection, and  that  so  far  there  is  a  real  something  in  it. 
Then  comes  the  question,  who  is  it,  what  is  it,  that  misdi- 
rects? Is  the  misdirection,  of  God?  That  will  not  be 
said.  Mr.  Parker  uses  also,  it  will  be  observed,  the  term 
"disease"  Will  it  then  be  said  that  piracy,  war,  and  the 
slave  trade  are  the  misdirections  only  of  disease,  as  when 
the  hand  of  a  lunatic,  misdirected  by  a  pressure  on  the 
brain,  takes  the  life  of  his  friend !  Was  it  only  for  such 
innocent  misdirection  as  this  that  Mr.  Parker  inveighed  so 
bitterly  against  the  great  statesman  of  New  England, 
as  having  bowed  himself  to  slavery  ?  Was  it  then  the  mis- 
direction of  cause  and  effect,  in  the  constituent  principles 
of  human  nature  ?  This  indeed  appears  to  be  intimated  in 
another  place,  when  it  is  declared  that, — "Discordant 
causes  have  produced  effects  not  harmonious."!  Is  the 
boasted  system  then  of  nature  a  discordant,  blundering, 
misdirecting  system?  If  so,  it  should  not  be  wholly  in- 
credible that  nature  may  sometime  blunder  into  a  miracle. 
Is  it  then  given  us,  for  our  privilege,  to  look  over  the  sad 
inventory  of  the  world's  history,  the  corruptions  of  truth 
and  religion,  the  bloody  persecutions,  the  massacres  of  the 
good,  the  revolutions  against  oppressions  and  oppressors, 
and  the  combinations  of  power  to  crush  them,  if  success- 

*  Discourses  of  Religion,  p.  13.        f  Discourses  of  Beligion,  p.  12. 


164  MISDIRECTION,    NOT    SIN. 

fill,  caste,  slavery  and  the  slave  trade,  piracy  and  war, 
tramping  in  blood  over  desolated  cities  and  empires — can 
we  look  on  these  and  have  it  as  our  soft  impeachment  to 
say,  that  they  are  only  the  misdirections  of  discordant 
causes  in  human  nature?  That  has  never  been  the  sense 
of  mankind,  and  never  can  be.  There  is  no  account  to 
be  made  of  these  misdirections,  till  we  bring  into  view 
man  as  he  is ;  a  power  capable  of  misdirecting  himself  and 
guilty  in  it,  because  he  does  it,  swayed  by  no  causes  in  or 
out  of  himself,  but  by  his  own  self-determining  will. 

Doubtless  there  is  abundance  of  misdirection;  almost 
every  thing  we  know  is  misdirected,  the  world  is  full  of  it, 
the  whole  creation  groaneth  in  the  sorrows,  wrongs,  pun- 
ishments, and  pains  of  it.  And  then  we  have  it  as  the 
true  account  of  all,  that  man  is  the  grand  misdirector. 
He  turns  God's  world  into  a  hell  of  misdirection,  and  that 
is  his  sin.  Apart  from  this,  any  such  thing  as  misdirec- 
tion is  inconceivable.  Nature  yields  no  such  thing ;  and, 
if  man  is  a  part  only  of  nature,  under  her  necessary  laws 
of  cause  and  effect,  there  will  be  as  little  place  for  misdi- 
rection in  his  activities,  as  there  is  in  the  laws  of  chemistry, 
or  even  of  the  solar  system.  The  plea  of  misdirection, 
therefore,  is  itself  a  concession  of  the  fact  of  sin,  which 
fact  we  now  assume  to  be  sufficiently  established  to  sup- 
port and  be  a  sure  foundation  for  our  future  argument. 


CHAPTER  VI. 

.       THE   CONSEQUENCES   OP   SIN. 

IT  is  very  evident  that,  if  sin  is  a  fact,  it  must  be  fol- 
lowed by  important  consequences ;  for,  as  it  has  a  moral 
significance  considered  in  the  aspect  of  blameworthiness, 
guilt,  penal  desert,  and  remorse,  so  also  it  has  a  dynamic 
force,  considered  as  acting  on  the  physical  order  and 
sphere  of  nature ;  in  the  contact  and  surrounding  of  which, 
its  transgressions  take  effect.  In  one  view,  it  is  the  fall 
of  virtue ;  in  the  other,  it  is  the  disorder  and  penal  dislo- 
cation both  of  the  soul  and  of  the  world.  As  crime,  it 
demolishes  the  sacred  and  supernatural  interests  of  charac- 
ter ;  as  a  force,  operating  through  and  among  the  retribu- 
tive causes  arranged  for  the  vindication  of  God's  law,  it  is 
the  disruption  of  nature,  a  shock  of  disorder  and  pain  that 
unsettles  the  apparent  harmony  of  things,  and  reduces  the 
world  to  a  state  of  imperfect,  or  questionable  beauty. 

What  I  now  propose,  then,  is  the  investigation  of  sin 
regarded  in  the  latter  of  these  two  aspects ;  or  to  show 
what  consequences  it  operates  or  provokes,  in  the  field  of 
nature. 

It  is  not  to  be  supposed  that  sin  has  power  to  annul  or 
discontinue  any  one  of  the  laws  of  nature.  The  same 
laws  are  in  action  after  the  sin,  or  under  it,  as  before. 
And  yet,  these  laws  continuing  the  same,  it  is  conceivable 
that  sin  may  effect  what  is  really,  and  to.  no  small  extent, 
a  new  resolution  or  combination,  which  is,  to  the  ideally 
perfect  state  of  nature,  what  disorder  is  to  order,  deformity 
to  beauty,  pain  to  peace.  This,  of  course,  it  will  do,  if  at 


166  SIN    PKOVOKES 

all,  by  a  force  exerted  in  the  material  world,  and  through 
the  laws  of  nature. 

At  the  point  of  his  will,  man  is  a  force,  we  have  seen, 
outside  of  nature ;  a  being  supernatural,  because  he  is  able 
to  act  on  the  chain  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature  from 
without  the  chain.  It  follows  then,  of  course,  that  by  act- 
ing in  this  manner  upon  nature,  he  can  vary  the  action 
of  nature  from  what  would  be  its  action,  were  there  no 
such  thing  as  a  force  external  to  the  scheme.  Nature,  in- 
deed, is  submitted  to  him,  as  we  have  seen,  for  this  very 
purpose ;  to  be  varied  in  its  action  by  his  action,  to  receive 
and  return  his  action,  so  to  be  the  field  and  medium  of  his 
exercise. 

Thus  it  is  a  favorite  doctrine  of  our  times,  that  the  laws 
of  the  world  are  retributive ;  so  that  every  sin  or  depart- 
ure from  virtue  will  be  faithfully  and  relentlessly  punished. 
The  very  world,  we  say,  is  a  moral  economy,  and  is  so 
arranged,  under  its  laws,  that  retribution  follows  at  the 
heels  of  all  sin.  And  by  this  fact  of  retribution,  we  mean 
that  disease,  pain,  sorrow,  deformity,  weakness,  disappoint- 
ment, defeat,  all  sorts  of  groanings,  all  sizes  and  shapes  of 
misery,  wait  upon  wrong-doers,  and,  when  challenged  by 
their  sin,  come  forth  to  handle  them  with  their  rugged 
and  powerful  discipline.  We  conceive  that,  in  this  way, 
the  aspects  of  human  society  and  the  world,  are  to  a 
considerable  degree,  determined.  But  we  do  not  always 
observe  that  nature  is,  by  the  supposition,  just  so  far 
displayed  under  a  variation  of  disorder  and  disease.  First 
appear  the  wrongs  to  be  chastised,  which  are  not  in- 
cluded in  the  causations  of  nature,  otherwise  they  were 
blameless ;  then  the  laws  of  nature,  met  by  these  provo- 
cations, commence  a  retributive  action,  such  as  nature. 


RETRIBUTIVE    CONSEQUENCES.  167 

unprovoked,  would  never  display.  The  sin  has  fallen 
into  nature  as  a  grain  of  sand  into  the  eye — and  as  the  eye 
is  the  same  organ  that  it  was  before,  having  the  same  laws, 
and  is  yet  so  far  changed  as  to  be  an  organ  of  pain  rather 
than  of  sight,  so  it  is  with  the  laws  of  nature,  in  their  penal 
and  retributive  action  now  begun.  Sin,  therefore,  is,  by 
the  supposition,  such  a  force  as  may  suffice,  in  a  society 
and  world  of  sin,  to  vary  the  combinations,  and  display  a 
new  resolution  of  the  activities,  of  nature.  The  laws  remain, 
but  they  are  met  and  provoked  by  a  new  ingredient  not 
included  in  nature ;  and  so  the  whole  field  of  nature,  other- 
wise a  realm  of  harmony,  and  peace,  and  beauty,  takes  a 
look  of  discord,  and,  with  many  traces  of  its  original  glory 
left,  displays  the  tokens  also  of  a  prison  and  a  hospital. 

Thus  far  we  have  spoken  of  the  power  there  is  in  sin  to 
provoke  a  different  action  of  natural  causes.  It  also  has 
a  direct  action  upon  nature  to  produce  other  conjunctions 
of  causes,  and  so,  other  results.  The  laws  all  continue 
their  action  as  before,  but  the  sin  committed  varies  the 
combinations  subject  to  their  action,  and  in  that  manner 
the  order  of  their  working.  Indeed,  we  have  seen  that 
nature  is,  to  a  certain  extent,  submitted  by  her  laws  to  the 
action  of  free  supernatural  agents;  which  implies  that 
her  action  can  be  varied  by  their  sovereignty  without  dis- 
placing the  laws,  nay  in  virtue  rather  of  the  submission 
they  are  appointed  to  enforce.  I  thrust  my  hand,  for  ex- 
ample, into  the  fire,  producing  thus  a  new  conjunction  of 
causes,  viz.,  fire  and  the  tissues  of  the  hand ;  and  the  result 
corresponds — a  state  of  suffering  ar  d  partial  disorganiza- 
tion. In  doing  this,  I  have  acted  only  through  the  laws 
of  nature — the  nervous  cord  has  carried  down  my  man- 
date to  the  muscles  of  the  arm,  the  muscles  have  contracted 


168  SIN    ALSO    PRODUCES 

obediently  to  the  mandate,  the  fire  has  done  its  part,  the 
nerves  of  sensation  have  brought  back  their  report,  all  in 
due  order,  but  the  result  is  a  pain  or  loss  of  the  injured 
member,  as  opposite  to  any  thing  mere  nature  would  have 
wrought  by  her  own  combinations,  as  if  it  were  the  fruit 
of  a  miracle.  So  it  is  with  all  the  crimes  of  violence,  rob- 
bery, murder,  assassination.  The  knife  in  the  assassin's 
hand  is  a  knife,  doing  what  a  knife  should,  by  the  laws 
which  determine  its  properties.  The  heart  of  the  victim  is 
a  heart,  beating  on,  subject  to  its  laws,  and,  when  it  is 
pierced,  driving  out  the  blood  from  his  opened  side,  as  cer- 
tainly as  it  before  drove  the  living  flood  through  the  cir- 
culations of  the  body.  But  the  thrust  of  the  knife,  which 
is  from  the  assassin's  will,  makes  a  conjunction  which 
nature,  by  her  laws  alone,  would  never  make,  and  by 
force  of  this  the  victim  dies.  In  like  manner,  a  poison 
administered  acts  by  its  own  laws  in  the  body  of  the 
victim,  which  body  also  acts  according  to  its  laws,  and 
the  result  ensuing  is  death ;  which  death  is  attributable, 
not  to  the  scheme  of  nature,  but  to  a  false  conjunction  of 
substances  that  was  brought  to  pass  wickedly,  by  a  human 
will.  In  all  these  cases,  the  results  of  pain,  disorder,  and 
death  are  properly  said  to  be  unnatural ;  being,  in  a  sense, 
violations  of  nature.  The  scheme  of  nature  included  no 
such  results.  They  are  disorders  and  dislocations  made 
by  the  misconj  unction  or  abuse  of  causes  in  the  scheme 
of  nature.  And  the  same  will  be  true  of  all  the  events 
that  follow,  in  the  vast  complications  and  chains  of  causes, 
to  the  end  of  the  world.  Whatever  mischief,  or  unnatural 
result  is  thus  brought  to  pass  by  sin,  will  be  the  first  link 
of  an  endless  chain  of  results  not  included  in  the  scheme 


NEW    CONJUNCTIONS    OF    CAUSES.  169 

of  nature,  and  so  the  beginning  of  an  ever- widening  circle 
of  disturbance.  And  this  is  the  true  account  of  evil. 

But  it  will  occur  to  some,  that  all  human  activities,  the 
good  as  well  as  the  bad,  are  producing  new  conjunctions 
of  causes  that  otherwise  would  not  exist.  Mere  nature 
will  never  set  a  wheel  to  the  water-fall,  or  adjust  the  sub- 
stances that  compose  a  house  or  a  steamboat.  How  then 
does  it  appear  that  the  results  of  sin  are  called  dislocations 
or  disorders,  or  regarded  as  unnatural,  with  any  greater 
propriety  than  the  results  of  virtuous  industry  and  all 
right  action?  Because,  we  answer,  the  scheme  of  nature 
is  adjusted  for  uses,  not  for  abuses;  for  improvement,  cul- 
ture, comfort,  and  advancing  productiveness ;  not  for  de- 
struction or  corruption.  Therefore,  it  consists  with  the 
scheme  of  nature  that  water-wheels,  houses,  and  steam- 
boats should  be  built ;  for  all  the  substances  and  powers 
of  nature  are  given  to  be  harnessed  for  service,  and  when 
they  are,  it  is  no  dislocation,  but  only  a  fulfilling  of  the 
natural  order. 

We  come,  also,  to  the  same  result  by  another  and  differ- 
ent process ;  viz.,  by  considering  what  sin  is  in  its  relation 
to  God  and  his  works.  In  its  moral  conception,  it  is  an 
act  against  God,  or  the  will  and  authority  of  God.  And, 
since  God  is  every  where  consistent  with  himself,  setting 
all  his  creations  in  harmony  with  his  principles,  it  is  of 
course  an  act  against  the  physical  order,  as  truly  as  against 
the  moral  and  spiritual.  Taken  as  a  dynamic,  therefore, 
it  wars  with  the  scheme  of  nature,  and  fills  it  with  the 
turmoil  of  its  disorders  and  perversities.  Or,  if  we  take 
the  concrete,  speaking  of  the  sinner  himself,  he  is  a  sub- 
stance, in  a  world  of  substances,  acting  as  he  was  not  made 
to  act.  He  was  not  made  to  sin,  and  the  world  was  not 

15 


170   SIN  THE   ACTING  OF  A  SUBSTANCE,   MAN, 

made  to  help  him  sin.  The  mind  of  God  being  wholly 
against  sin,  the  cast  of  every  world  and  substance  is  re- 
pugnant to  sin.  The  transgressor,  therefore,  is  a  free  power 
acting  against  God  morally,  and  physically  against  the 
cast  of  every  world  and  substance  of  God — acting  in,  or 
among  the  worlds  and  substances,  as  he  was  not  made  to  act. 

This,  too,  is  the  sentence  of  consciousness.  The  wrong- 
doer says  within  himself, — "I  was  not  made  to  act  thus, 
no  laws  of  cause  and  effect,  acting  through  me,  did  the 
deed.  I  did  it  myself,  therefore  am  I  guilty.  Had  I  been 
made  for  the  sin,  it  had  been  no  sin,  but  only  a  fulfillment 
of  the  ends  included  in  my  substance."  And  how  terribly 
is  this  verdict  certified  by  the  discovery  that  the  world 
refuses  to  bless  him,  and  that  all  he  does  upon  it  is  a  work 
of  deformity,  shame,  and  disorder.  The  very  substances 
of  the  world  answer,  as  it  were,  in  groans,  to  the  violations 
of  his  guilty  practice. 

Suppose,  then,  what  all  natural  philosophers  assume, 
that  nature,  considered  as  a  realm  of  cause  and  effect,  is  a 
perfect  system  of  order ;  what  must  take  place  in  that  sys- 
tem, when  some  one  substance,  no  matter  what,  begins  to 
act  as  it  was  not  made  to  act  ?  What  can  follow,  but  some 
general  disturbance  of  the  ideal  harmony  of  the  system 
itself?  It  will  be  as  if  some  wheel  or  member  in  a  watch, 
had  been  touched  by  a  magnet  and  began  to  have  an 
action,  thus,  not  intended  by  the  maker;  every  other 
wheel  and  member  will  be  affected  by  the  vice  of  the  one. 
Or  it  will  be  as  if  some  planet,  or  star,  taking  its  own  way, 
were  to  set  itself  on  acting  as  it  was  not  made  to  act;  in- 
stantly the  shock  of  disorder  is  felt  by  every  other  mem- 
ber of  the  system.  Or  we  may  draw  an  illustration,  closer 
to  probability,  from  the  vital  forms  of  physiology.  A 


AS    HE    WAS    NOT    MADE    TO    ACT.  171 

vital  creature  is  a  kind  of  unit,  or  little  universe,  fashioned 
by  the  life.  Thus  an  egg  is  a  complete  vital  system,  having 
all  its  vessels,  ducts,  fluids,  quantities,  and  qualities,  ar- 
ranged to  meet  the  action  of  the  embryonic  germ.  Sup- 
pose, now,  in  the  process  of  incubation,  that  some  small 
speck,  or  point  of  matter,  under  the  shell,  should  begin,  as 
the  germ  quickens,  to  act  as  it  was  not  made  to  act,  or 
against  the  internal  harmony  of  the  process  going  on, 
what  must  be  the  result?  Either  a  disease,  manifestly,  that 
stops  the  process,  or  else  a  deformity ;  a  chick  without  a 
wing,  or  with  one  too  many,  or  in  some  way  imperfectly 
organized.  What  then  must  follow,  when  a  whole  order 
of  substances  called  men,  having  an  immense  power  over 
the  lines  of  causes  in  the  world,  not  only  begin,  but  for  thou- 
sands of  years  continue,  and  that  on  so  large  a  scale  that 
history  itself  is  scarcely  more  than  a  record  of  the  fact,  to 
act  as  they  were  not  made  to  act?  We  have  only  to  raise 
this  question,  to  see  that  the  scheme  of  nature  is  marred, 
corrupted,  dislocated  by  innumerable  disturbances  and 
disorders.  Her  laws  all  continue,  but  her  conjunctions 
of  causes  are  unnatural.  Immense  transformations  are 
wrought,  which  represent,  on  a  large  scale,  the  repugnant, 
disorderly  fact  of  sin.  Indeed  what  we  call  nature  must 
be  rather  a  condition  of  unnature ;  apostolically  represented, 
a  whole  creation  groaning  and  travailing  in  pain  together 
with  man,  in  the  disorder  consequent  on  his  sin. 

The  conclusion  at  which  we  thus  arrive  is  one  that  will 
be  practically  verified  by  inspection.  Let  us  undertake 
then  a  brief  survey  of  the  great  departments  of  human 
existence  and  the  world,  and  discover,  as  far  as  we  are 
able,  the  extent  of  the  evil  consequences  wrought  by 
sin. 


172  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

We  begin  with,  the  soul  or  with  souls.  The  soul,  in  its 
normal  state,  including  the  will  or  supernatural  power,  to- 
gether with  the  involuntary  powers  subordinated  to  it  by 
their  laws,  is  an  instrument  tuned  by  the  key-note  of  the 
conscience,  viz.  right,  to  sound  harmoniously  with  it;  or 
it  is  a  fluid,  we  may  say,  whose  form,  or  law  of  crystalli- 
zation is  the  conscience.  And  then  it  follows  that,  if 
the  will  breaks  into  revolt,  the  instrument  is  mistuned  in 
every  string,  the  fluid  shaken  becomes  a  shapeless,  opaque 
mass,  without  unity  or  crystalline  order.  Or,  if  we  resort 
to  the  analogies  of  vital  phenomena,  which  are  still  closer, 
a  revolted  will  is  to  the  soul,  or  in  it,  what  a  foreign  un- 
reducible  substance  is  in  the  vital  and  vascular  system  of 
the  egg,  or  (to  repeat  an  illustration,)  what  a  grain  of  sand 
is  in  the  eye — the  soul  has  become  a  weeping  organ,  not 
an  organ  simply  of  sight.  Given  the  fact  of  sin,  the  fact 
of  a  fatal  breach  in  the  normal  state,  or  constitutional  or- 
der of  the  soul,  follows  of  necessity.  And  exactly  this 
we  shall  see,  if  we  look  in  upon  its  secret  chambers  and 
watch  the  motions  of  sins  in  the  confused  ferment  they 
raise — the  perceptions  discolored,  the  judgments  unable  to 
hold  their  scales  steadily  because  of  the  fierce  gusts  of 
passion,  the  thoughts  huddling  by  in  crowds  of  wild  sug- 
gestion, the  imagination  haunted  by  ugly  and  disgustful 
shapes,  the  appetites  contesting  with  reason,  the  senses 
victorious  over  faith,  anger  blowing  the  overheated  fires 
of  malice,  low  jealousies  sulking  in  dark  angles  of  the 
soul,  and  envies  baser  still,  hiding  under  the  skim  of  its 
green-mantled  pools — all  the  powers  that  should  be  strung 
in  harmony,  loosened  from  each  other,  and  brewing  in  hope 
less  and  helpless  confusion ;  the  conscience  meantime  thun 
dering  wrathfully  above  and  shooting  down  hot  bolts  of 


IN    SOULS.  173 

judgment,  and  the  pallid  fears  hurrying  wildly  about 
with  their  brimstone  torches — these  are  the  motions  of 
sins,  the  Tartarean  landscape  of  the  soul  and  its  disorders, 
when  self-government  is  gone  and  the  constituent  integ- 
rity is  dissolved.  We  can  not  call  it  the  natural  state  of 
man,  nature  disowns  it.  No  one  that  looks  in  upon  the 
ferment  of  its  morbid,  contesting,  rasping,  restive,  uncon- 
trollable action  can  imagine,  for  a  moment,  that  he  looks 
upon  the  sweet,  primal  order  of  life  and  nature.  No  name 
sufficiently  describes  it,  unless  we  coin  a  name  and  call 
it  a  condition  of  unnature. 

Not  that  any  law  of  the  soul's  nature  is  discontinued,  or 
that  any  capacity  which  makes  one  a  proper  man  is  taken 
away  by  the  bad  inheritance,  as  appears  to  be  the  view  of 
some  theologians ;  every  function  of  thought  and  feeling 
remains,  every  mental  law  continues  to  run ;  the  disorder 
is  that  of  functions  abused  and  laws  of  operation  provoked 
to  a  penal  and  retributive  action,  by  the  misdoings  of  an 
evil  will.  Though  it  is  become,  in  this  manner,  a  weep- 
ing organ,  as  we  just  now  intimated,  still  it  is  an  organ  of 
sight ;  only  it  sees  through  tears.  And  the  profound  re- 
ality of  the  disorder  appears  in  the  fact  that  the  will  by 
which  it  was  wrought  can  not,  unassisted,  repair  it.  To 
do  this,  in  fact,  is  much  the  same  kind  of  impossibility— 
the  phrenologists  will  say  precisely  the  same — as  for  a 
man  who  has  disorganized  his  brain  by  over-exertion,  or 
by  steeping  it  in  opium,  or  drenching  it  in  alcohol,  to  take 
hold,  by  his  will,  of  the  millions  of  ducts  and  fibers  woven 
together  in  the  mysterious  net- work  of  its  substance,  and 
bring  them  all  back  into  the  spontaneous  order  of  health 
and  spiritual  integrity. 

No !  it  is  one  thing  to  break  or  shatter  an  organization, 
15* 


174  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

and  a  very  different  to  restore  it.  Almost  any  one  can 
break  an  egg,  but  not  all  the  chemists  in  the  world  can 
make  one  whole,  or  restore  even  so  much  as  the  slightest 
fracture  of  the  shell.  As  little  can  a  man  will  back,  into 
order  and  tune,  this  fearfully  vast  and  delicate  complica- 
tion of  faculties ;  which  indeed  he  can  not  even  conceive, 
except  in  the  crudest  manner,  by  the  study  of  a  life. 

It  is  important  also,  considering  the  moral  reactions  of 
the  body,  and  especially  the  great  fact  of  a  propagation 
of  the  species,  to  notice  the  disorganizing  effect  of  sin,  in 
the  body.  Body  and  soul,  as  long  as  they  subsist  in  their 
organized  state,  are  a  strict  unity.  The  abuses  of  one  are 
abuses  also  of  the  other,  the  disturbances  and  diseases  of 
one  disturb  and  disease  the  other.  The  fortunes  of  the 
body  must,  in  this  way,  follow  the  fortunes  of  the  soul, 
whose  organ  it  is.  Sin  has  all  its  working  too  in  the  work- 
ing of  the  brain.  To  think  an  evil  thought,  indulge  a 
wicked  purpose  or  passion,  will,  in  this  view,  be  much  as 
if  the  sin  had  brought  in  a  grain  of  sand  and  lodged  it  in 
the  tissues  of  the  brain.  What  then  must  be  the  effect, 
when  every  path  in  its  curious  net- work  of  intelligence  is 
traveled,  year  by  year,  by  the  insulting  myriads  of  sinning 
thought,  hardened  by  the  tramp  of  their  feet,  and  dusted 
by  their  smoky  trail. 

But  we  are  speaking  theoretically.  If  we  turn  to  prac- 
tical evidences,  or  matters  of  fact,  we  shall  see  plainly 
enough  that  what  should  follow,  in  the  effects  of  sin  upon 
the  body,  actually  does  follow.  How  the  vices  of  the  ap- 
petites and  passions  terminate  in  diseases  and  a  final  disor- 
ganization of  the  body,  is  well  understood.  The  false  con- 
junction made  by  intemperate  drink,  deluging  the  tissues 


IN    THE    BODY.  175 

of  the  body  with  its  liquid  poisons,  and  reducing  the  body 
to  a  loathsome  wreck,  is  not  peculiar  to  that  vice.  The 
condition  of  sin  is  a  condition  of  general  intemperance. 
It  takes  away  the  power  of  self-government,  loosens  the 
passions,  and  makes  even  the  natural  appetite  for  food  an  in- 
stigator of  excess.  Indeed,  how  many  of  the  sufferings  and 
infirmities  even  of  persons  called  virtuous,  are  known  by 
all  intelligent  physicians  to  be  only  the  groaning  of  the 
body  under  loads  habitually  imposed,  by  the  untempered 
and  really  diseased  voracity  of  their  appetites.  And  if  we 
could  trace  all  the  secret  actions  of  causes,  how  faithfully 
would  the  fevers,  the  rheumatisms,  the  neuralgic  and  hy- 
pochondriacal  torments,  all  the  grim  looking  woes  of  dys- 
pepsia, be  seen  to  follow  the  unregulated  license  of  this 
kind  of  sin.  Nor  is  any  thing  better  understood  than 
that  whatever  vice  of  the  mind — wounded  pride,  unregu- 
lated ambition,  hatred,  covetousness,  fear,  inordinate  care 
— throws  the  mind  out  of  rest,  throws  the  body  out  of  rest 
also.  Thus  it  is  that  sin,  in  all  its  forms,  becomes  a  pow- 
er of  bodily  disturbance,  shattering  the  nerves,  inflaming 
the  tissues,  distempering  the  secretions,  and  brewing  a 
general  ferment  of  disease.  In  one  view,  the  body  is  a 
kind  of  perpetual  crystallization,  and  the  crystal  of  true 
health  can  not  form  itself  under  sin,  because  the  body  has, 
within,  a  perpetual  agitating  cause,  which  forbids  the  pro- 
cess. If  then,  looking  round  upon  the  great  field  of  hu- 
manity, and  noting  the  almost  universal  working  of  dis- 
ease, in  so  many  forms  and  varieties  that  they  can  not  be 
named  or  counted,  we  sometimes  exclaim  with  a  sigh,  what 
a  hospital  the  world  is !  we  must  be  dull  spectators,  if  we 
stop  at  this,  and  do  not  also  connect  the  remembrance  that 
sin  is  in  the  world;  a  gangrene  of  the  mind,  poisoning  al. 


176  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

the  roots  of  health  and  making  visible  its  woes,  by  so 
many  woes  of  bodily  disease  and  death. 

The  particular  question,  whether  bodily  mortality  has 
entered  the  world  by  sin,  we  will  not  discuss.  That  is 
principally  a  scripture  question,  and  the  word  of  scrip- 
ture is  not  to  be  assumed  in  my  argument.  There  obvi- 
ously might  have  been  a  mode  of  translation  to  the  second 
life,  that  should  have  none  of  the  painful  and  revolting 
incidents  which  constitute  the  essential  reality  of  death. 
We  do  moreover  know  that  a  very  considerable  share  of 
the  diseases  and  deaths  of  our  race  are  the  natural  effects 
of  sin  or  wrong-doing.  There  is  great  reason  also  to  sus- 
pect, so  devastating  is  the  power  of  moral  evil,  that  the 
infections  and  deadly  plagues  of  the  world  are  somehow 
generated  by  this  cause.  They  seem  to  have  their  spring 
in  some  new  virus  of  death,  and  this  new  virus  must 
have  been  somewhere  and  somehow  distilled,  or  generated. 
We  can  not  refer  them  to  mineral  causes,  or  vegetable,  or 
animal,  which  are  nearly  invariable,  and  they  seem,  as  they 
begin  their  spread  at  some  given  locality,  to  have  a  hu- 
manly personal  origin.  That  the  virus  of  a  poisonous 
and  deadly  contagion  has  been  generated  by  human  vices, 
we  know,  as  a  familiar  fact  of  history ;  which  makes  it  the 
more  probable  that  other  pestilential  contagions  have  been 
generated  in  the  deteriorated  populations  and  sweltering 
vices  of  the  East,  whence  our  plagues  are  mostly  derived. 
On  this  point  we  assert  nothing  as  a  truth  positively  dis- 
covered; we  only  design,  by  these  references,  to  suggest 
the  possible  (and,  to  us,  probable,)  extent  and  power  of 
that  ferment,  brewed  by  the  instigations  of  sin,  in  the  dis- 
eased populations  of  the  world.  What  we  suggest  re- 
specting the  virus  of  the  world's  plagues  may  be  true,  or 


IN    SOCIETY.  177 

it  may  not;  this  at  least  is  shown  beyond  all  question,  that 
sin  is  a  wide-spreading,  dreadful  power  of  bodily  distem- 
per and  disorganization,  which  is  the  point  of  principal 
consequence  to  our  argument. 

Passing  now  to  society  and  the  disorganizing  effects  of 
sin  there  to  appear,  we  see,  at  a  glance,  that  if  the  soul 
and  body  are  both  distempered  and  reduced  to  a  state  of 
unnature,  the  great  interest  of  society  must  suffer  in  a 
correspondent  manner  and  degree.  Considered  as  a  growth 
or  propagation,  humanity  is,  in  some  very  important  sense, 
an  organic  whole.  If  the  races  are  not  all  descended  of  a 
single  pair,  but  of  several  or  even  many  pairs,  as  is  now 
strenuously  asserted  by  some,  both  on  grounds  of  science 
and  of  scripture  interpretation,  still  it  makes  no  difference 
as  regards  the  matter  of  their  practical  and  properly  relig- 
ious unity.  The  genus  humanity  is  still  a  single  genus 
comprehending  the  races,  and  we  know  from  geology  that 
they  had  a  begun  existence.  That  they  also  sinned,  at  the 
beginning,  is  as  clear,  from  the  considerations  already  ad- 
vanced, as  if  they  had  been  one.  Whence  it  follows  that 
descendants  of  the  sinning  pair,  or  pairs,  born  of  natures 
thrown  out  of  harmony  and  corrupted  by  sin,  could  not,  on 
principles  of  physiology,  apart  from  scripture  teachings, 
be  unaffected  by  the  distempers  of  their  parentage.  They 
must  be  constituently  injured,  or  depravated.  It  is  not 
even  supposable  that  organic  natures,  injured  and  disord- 
ered, as  we  have  seen  that  human  bodies  are  by  sin,  should 
propagate  their  life  in  a  progeny  unmarred  and  perfect. 
If  we  speak  of  sin  as  action,  their  children  may  be  inno- 
cent, and  so  far  may  reveal  the  loveliness  of  innocence ; — 
still  the  crystalline  order  is  broken ;  the  passions,  tempers,. 


178  CONSEQUENCES    OP    SIN, 

appetites,  are  not  in  the  proportions  of  harmony  and  rea- 
son ;  the  balance  of  original  health  is  gone  by  anticipation ; 
and  a  distempered  action  is  begun,  whose  affinities  sort 
with  evil  rather  than  with  good.  It  is  as  if,  by  their  own 
sin,  they  had  just  so  far  distempered  their  organization. 
Thus  far  the  fruit  of  sin  is  in  them.  And  this  the  scrip- 
tures, in  a  certain  popular,  comprehensive  way,  sometimes 
call  "sin;"  because  it  is  a  condition  of  depravation  that 
may  well  enough  be  taken  as  the  root  of  a  guilty,  sinning 
life.  They  do  not  undertake  to  settle  metaphysically  the 
point  where  personal  guilt  commences,  but  only  suit  their 
convenience  in  a  comprehensive  term  that  designates  the 
race  as  sinners;  passing  by  those  speculative  questions 
that  only  divert  attention  from  the  salvation  provided  for 
a  world  of  sinners.  The  doctrine  of  physiology  there- 
fore is  the  doctrine  of  original  sin,  and  we  are  held  to  in- 
evitable orthodoxy  by  it,  even  if  the  scriptures  are  cast 
away. 

But  if  the  laws  of  propagation  contain  the  fact,  in  this 
manner,  of  an  organic  depravation  of  humanity  or  human 
society,  under  sin  once  broken  loose,  many  will  apprehend  in 
such  a  fact,  some  ground  of  impeachment  against  God ;  as  if 
he  had  set  us  on  our  trial,  under  terms  of  the  sorest  disadvan- 
tage. If  we  start,  they  ask,  under  conditions  of  hereditary 
damage,  with  natures  depravated  and  affinities  already  dis- 
tempered by  the  sin  of  progenitors,  as  truly  as  if  we  had 
commenced  the  bad  life  ourselves,  what  is  our  bad  life 
when  we  begin  it,  but  the  natural  issue  of  our  hopeless, 
misbegotten  constitution?  It  is  no  sufficient  answer  to  say 
that  no  blame  attaches  to  the  mere  depravation  supposed, 
whether  it  be  called  sin  or  by  any  other  name;  it  shocks 
them  to  hear  it  even  suggested,  that  a  good  being  like 


IN    SOCIETY.  179 

God  can  have  set  us  forth  in  our  trial,  under  such  immense 
disadvantages.  Probably  enough  they  assail  the  doc- 
trine of  inherited  depravity,  in  terms  of  fiery  denuncia- 
tion, whether  taken  as  a  dogma  set  up  by  theologians,  or 
as  being  affirmed  by  Christian  revelation  itself;  not  ob- 
serving that  it  is  the  inevitable  fact  also  of  human  histo 
ry ;  and,  admitting  the  fact  of  sin,  a  necessary  deduction 
even  of  physiological  science. 

Now  so  far  from  admitting  the  supposed  disadvantage 
incurred  by  this  organic  depravation  of  the  race,  or  the 
mode  of  existence  to  which  it  pertains  as  a  natural  inci- 
dent, we  are  led  to  an  opinion  exactly  opposite.  Indeed 
there  appears  to  be  no  other  way  possible,  in  which  the 
race  could  have  been  set  forth  on  their  trial,  with  as  good 
chances  of  a  successful  and  happy  issue. 

Thus,  taking  it  for  granted,  that  God  is  to  create  a 
moral  population,  or  a  population  of  free  intelligences, 
that,  having  a  begun  existence,  are  to  be  educated  into,  and 
finally  established  in,  good,  there  were  obviously  two 
methods  possible.  They  might  always  be  created  outright 
in  full  volume,  like  so  many  Adams,  only  to  exist  inde- 
pendently and  apart  from  all  reproductive  arrangements, 
or  they  might  be  introduced,  as  we  are,  in  the  frail  and 
barely  initiated  existence  of  the  infantile  state,  each  genera- 
tion born  of  the  preceding,  and  altogether  composing  a 
rigidly  constituent  organic  unity  of  races. 

In  the  former  case  they  would  have  the  advantage  of  a 
perfectly  uncorrupted  nature,  and,  if  that  be  any  advant- 
age, of  a  full  maturity  in  what  may  be  called  the  raw  sta- 
ple of  their  functions.  But  such  advantages  amount  to 
scarcely  more  than  the  opportunity  of  a  greater  and  more 
tremendous  peril;  for,  being  all,  by  supposition,  under 


180  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

the  same  conditions  privative  with  the  first  man  of  scrip- 
ture,* they  would  as  certainly  do  the  same  things,  de- 
scending to  the  same  bad  experiment,  to  be  involved  in 
the  same  consequent  fall  and  disorder.  They  would  only 
be  more  strictly  original  in  their  depravation,  having  it  as 
the  fruit  of  their  own  guilty  choices. 

And  then,  as  regards  all  mitigating  and  restoring  influ- 
ences, the  comparative  disadvantage  would  be  immense. 
Self-centered  now,  every  man  in  his  sin,  and  having  no 
ligatures  of  race  and  family  and  family  affection  to  bind 
them  together,  the  selfishness  of  their  fall  would  be  un- 
qualified, softened  by  no  mitigations.  Spiritual  love  they 
can  not  understand,  because  they  never  have  felt  the  natu- 
ral love  of  sex,  family,  and  kindred,  by  which,  under  con- 
ditions of  propagation,  a  kind  of  inevitable,  first-stage  vir- 
tue is  instituted;  such  as  mitigates  the  severities  of  sin, 
softens  the  sentiments  to  a  social,  tender  play,  and  offers 
to  the  mind  a  type,  every  where  present,  of  the  beauty  and 
true  joy  of  a  disinterested,  spiritual  benevolence.  They 
compose,  instead,  a  burly  prison-gang  of  probationers, 
linked  together  by  no  ties  of  consanguinity,  reflecting  no 
traces  of  family  likeness,  bent  to  each  other's  and  God's 
love  by  no  dear  memories.  Society  there  is  none.  Law 
is  impossible.  Society  and  law  suppose  conditions  of  or- 
ganic unity  already  prepared.  Every  man  for  himself,  is 
the  grand  maxim  of  life;  for  all  are  atoms  together,  in  the 
medley  of  the  common  selfishness;  only  the  old  atoms 
have  an  immense  advantage  over  the  young  ones  fresh  ar- 
rived; for  these  new  comers  of  probation,  come  of  course 
to  the  prey,  having  no  guardians  or  protectors,  and  no 
tender  sentiments  of  care  and  kindred  prepared  to  shelter 

*  Chapter  IV.,  p.  111. 


IN    SOCIETY.  181 

them  and  smooth  their  way.  Besides,  the  world  into 
which  they  come  must  have  been  already  fouled  and  dis- 
ordered by  the  sin  of  the  prior  populations,  and  must 
therefore  be  a  frame  of  being,  wholly  inappropriate  to  their 
new-created  innocence;  or  else,  if  not  thus  disordered, 
must  have  been  a  casement  of  iron,  too  rigid  and  impas- 
sive to  receive  any  injury  from  sin,  and  therefore  incapa- 
ble of  any  retributive  discipline  returned  upon  it.  There 
is,  in  short,  no  condition  of  trial  which,  after  all,  is  seen  to 
be  so  utterly  forbidding  and  hopeless  as  just  this  state  of 
Adamic  innocence,  independence,  and  maturity  of  faculty, 
which  many  are  so  ready  to  require  of  God,  as  the  only 
method  of  promise  and  fair  advantage,  in  the  beginning 
of  a  responsible  life.  • 

How  different  the  condition  realized  where  men  are 
propagated  as  a  race  or  races.  Then  are  they  linked  to- 
gether by  a  necessary,  constituent,  anticipative  love. 
Moved  by  this  love,  the  progenitors  are  immediately  set  to 
a  work  of  care  and  benefaction,  beautifully  opposite  to  the 
proper  selfishness  of  their  sin.  The  delicate  and  tender 
oeing  received  to  their  embrace,  circulates  their  blood, 
will  bear  their  name,  and  is  looked  upon,  even  by  their 
selfishness,  as  a  jiultiplied  and  dearer  self.  They  are  even 
made  to  feel,  in  a  lower  and  more  rudimental  way,  what 
joy  there  is  in  a  disinterested  love ;  and  they  pour  out 
their  fondness,  in  ways  that  even  try  their  invention,  insti- 
gated by  the  compulsory  bliss  of  sacrifice.  They  want 
the  best  things  too  for  their  child,  even  his  virtue ;  and 
probably  enough  his  religious  virtue ;  for  they  dread  the 
bitter  woes  of  wrong-doing.  This  is  true,  at  least,  of  all 
but  such  as  have  fallen  below  nature  in  their  vices,  and 
ceased  to  hear  her  voice.  They  even  undertake  to  be  a 

16 


182  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

providence,  and  do  for  their  child  all  which  the  love  of 
God,  even  till  now  rejected,  has  been  seeking  to  do  for 
themselves;  commanding  him  away  from  wrong,  and 
warning  him  faithfully  of  its  dangers.  Besides  it  is  a 
great  point,  in  the  scheme  of  propagated  life,  that  the  child 
learns  how  to  be  grown,  so  to  speak,  into,  and  exist  in, 
another  will ;  which  is  an  immense  advantage  to  the  relig- 
ious nurture,  even  where  the  parental  character  is  not 
good.  He  is  not  like  a  population  of  untutored,  unregu- 
lated Adams,  who  have  just  come  to  the  finding  of  a  man's 
will  in  them,  and  do  not  know  how  to  use  it,  least  of  all 
how  to  sink  it  obediently  in  the  sovereign  will  and  author- 
ity of  God.  The  child's  will  grew  in  authority,  and  he  comes 
out  gently,  in  the  reverence  of  a  subordinated  habit,  to 
choose  the  way  of  obedience,  having  his  religious  con- 
science configured  and  trained,  by  a  kind  of  family  con- 
science, previously  developed.  There  is  almost  no  family 
therefore — none  except  the  very  worst  and  most  de- 
praved— in  which  the  rule  of  the  house  is  not  a  great 
spiritual  benefit,  and  a  means  even  of  religious  virtue. 
How  much  more,  where  the  odor  of  a  heavenly  piety  fills 
the  house  and  sanctifies  the  atmosphere  of  life  itself.  In- 
stead of  being  set  forth  as  an  overgrown  man,  issued  from 
the  Creator's  hand  to  make  the  tremendous  choice,  undi- 
rected by  experience,  he  is  gently  inducted,  as  it  were,  by 
choices  of  parents  before  his  own,  into  the  habit  and 
accepted  practice  of  all  holy  obedience ;  growing  up  in  the 
nurture  of  their  grace,  as  truly  as  of  their  natural  affec- 
tion. Furthermore,  as  corruption  or  depravation  is  propa- 
gated, under  well-known  laws  of  physiology,  what  are  we 
to  think  but  that  a  regenerate  life  may  be  also  propaga- 
ted; and  that  so  the  scripture  truth  of  a  sanctification 


IN    SOCIETY.  183 

from  the  womb  may  sometime  cease  to  be  a  thing  remark- 
able and  become  a  commonly  expected  fact  ?  And  then, 
if  a  point  should  finally  be  reached,  under  the  sublime 
palingennesia  of  redemption,  when  Christian  faith,  together 
with  its  fruits  of  nurture  and  sanctified  propagation,  should 
be  nearly  or  quite  universal,  and  the  world,  which  is  now 
in  its  infancy,  should  roll  on,  millions  of  ages  after,  train- 
ing its  immense  populations  for  the  skies,  how  magnificent- 
ly preponderant  the  advantages  of  the  plan  of  propagation, 
which  at  first  we  thought  could  be  only  a  plan  to  set  us 
out  in  the  wrong,  and  sacrifice  our  virtue  by  anticipation. 

This  comparison,  which  might  otherwise  seem  to  be  a 
digression,  will  effectually  remove  those  false  impressions 
so  generally  prevalent  concerning  God's  equity  in  the  fact 
of  natural  corruption ;  and  if  this  be  done,  a  chief  impedi- 
ment to  all  right  conceptions  of  the  human  state,  as  affect- 
ed by  sin,  will  be  removed.  In  this  manner,  wholly  apart 
from  the  scriptures,  instructed  only  by  the  laws  of  physi- 
ology, we  discover  the  certain  truth  of  an  organic  fall  or 
social  lapse  in  the  race;  we  find  humanity  broken,  disor- 
dered, plunged  into  unnature  by  sin;  but  dark  and  fearful 
as  the  state  may  be,  there  is  nothing  in  it  unhopeful,  noth- 
ing to  accuse.  We  are  only  where  we  should  be,  each  by 
his  own  act,  if  we  were  created  independently;  with  im- 
mense advantages  added  to  mitigate  the  hopelessness  of 
our  disorder. 

It  is  very  true  that,  under  these  physiological  terms  of 
propagation,  society  falls  or  goes  down  as  a  unit,  and  evil 
becomes,  in  a  sense,  organic  in  the  earth.  The  bad  in- 
heritance passes,  and  fears,  frauds,  crimes  against  property, 
character  and  life,  abuses  of  power,  oppressions  of  the 
weak,  persecutions  of  the  good,  piracies,  wars  of  revolt,  and 


184  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

wars  of  conquest,  are  the  staple  of  the  world's  bitter  histo- 
ry. All  that  Mr.  Fourier  has  said  of  society,  in  its  practi- 
cal operation,  is  true ;  it  is  a  pitiless  and  dreadful  power, 
as  fallen  society  should  be.  And  yet  it  is  a  condition  of 
existence  far  less  dreadful  than  it  would  be,  if  the  organic 
force  of  natural  affinities  and  affections  were  not  operative 
still,  in  the  desolations  of  evil,  to  produce  institutions,  con- 
struct nations,*  and  establish  a  condition  of  qualified 
unity  and  protection.  Otherwise,  or  existing  only  as 
separate  units,  in  no  terms  of  consanguinity,  we  should, 
probably,  fall  into  a  state  of  utter  non-organization,  or, 
what  is  the  same,  of  universal  prey.  The  grand  woe  of 
society,  therefore,  is  not,  as  this  new  prophet  of  science 
teaches,  the  bad  organization  of  society ;  but  that  good  or- 
ganization, originally  beautiful  and  beneficent,  can  only 
mitigate,  but  can  not  shut  away,  the  evils  by  which  it  is 
infested.  The  line  of  propagation  is,  in  one  view,  the  line 
of  transmission  by  which  evil  passes;  but  it  is,  at  the  same 
time,  a  sure  spring  of  solidarity  and  organific  power,  by 
which  all  the  principal  checks  and  mitigations  of  evil, 
save  those  which  are  brought  in  with  the  grace  of  super- 
natural redemption,  are  supplied.  Otherwise  the  state  of 
evil,  untransmitted  and  purely  original  in  all,  would  make 
a  hell  of  anarchy,  unendurable  and  final. 

Nothing,  in  this  view,  could  be  more  superficial  than 
Mr.  Fourier's  conception  of  the  woes  of  society.  Ignoring, 
at  the  outset,  the  existence  of  sin,  and  assuming  that  every 
man  comes  from  the  hand  of  his  Maker  in  a  state  that 
represents  the  Maker's  integrity,  even  as  the  stars  do,  he 
lays  it  down  as  a  fundamental  maxim  of  science,  that  all 

*  The  word  itself  represents  upon  i4.  face  the  common  life  of  a  common 
root,  or  parentage. 


IN    SOCIETY.  185 

the  passions  and  appetites  of  the  race  are  like  gravity 
itself,  instincts  that  reach  after  order — in  his  own  rather 
pretentious  and  extra  scientific  language,  that  "attractions 
are  proportioned  to  destinies."  The  attractions  of  the 
worlds  of  matter  adjust  their  positions;  so  the  perfect 
order  of  the  heavens.  So  the  attractions  of  men,  to 
wit,  their  lusts,  appetites,  passions,  will  adjust  the  perfect 
order  of  society.  Why,  then,  do  they  not?  Because  of 
social  mal-organization.  And,  with  so  many  impulses 
or  passions  gravitating  all  toward  order,  whence  came  the 
mal-organization? — why  are  not  the  heavens,  too,  mal- 
organized,  and  with  as  good  right  ?  But  I  refer  to  these 
insane  theories  of  social  science,  not  for  any  purpose  of 
argument  against  them,  but  simply  to  get  light  and  shade 
for  my  subject.  The  woe  of  society  is  deeper  and  more 
difficult;  not  to  be  mended  by  artificial  reconstructions 
apart  from  all  ties  of  consanguinity,  not  by  contracts  of 
good  will  and  mutual  service,  not  by  bonds  of  interest  and 
licenses  of  passion.  It  lies,  first  of  all,  in  the  fall  of  man 
himself,  which  includes  the  fall  of  passion ;  a  fall  which  is 
mitigated  even  compulsorily  by  the  organific  power  of 
consanguinity,  but  can,  by  no  human  wisdom,  or  skill,  or 
combination,  be  restored.  Organization  will  do  what  it 
can,  it  will  be  more  or  less  bad  as  it  is  more  or  less  per- 
verted by  injustice,  or  misdirected  and  baffled  by  the 
instigations  of  selfishness  and  the  bad  affinities  and  de- 
monized  passions  of  sin.  % 

It  now  remains  to  carry  our  inquest  one  step  farther. 
If  sin  has  power,  taken  as  a  dynamic,  to  affect  the  soul, 
the  body,  and  society,  in  the  manner  already  indicated, 
reducing  all  these  departments  of  nature  to  a  state  un 

16* 


186  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

natural,  it  should  not  be  incredible  that  it  may  also  have 
power  to  produce  a  like  disorder  in  the  material  or  physi- 
cal world.  The  immense  power  of  the  human  will  over 
the  physical  substances  of  the  world  and  the  conjunctions 
of  its  causes,  is  seldom  adequately  conceived.  Almost 
every  thing,  up  to  the  moon,  is  capable  of  being  some- 
how varied  or  affected  by  it.  Being  a  force  supernatural, 
it  is  continually  playing  itself  into  the  chemistries  and 
external  combinations  of  matter,  converting  shapes,  re- 
ducing or  increasing  quantities,  transferring  positions, 
framing  and  dismembering  conjunctions,  turning  poisons 
into  medicines,  and  reducing  fruits  to  poisons,  till  at 
length  scarcely  any  thing  is  left  in  its  properly  natural 
state.  Some  of  these  changes,  which  it  is  the  toil  of 
human  life  to  produce,  are  beneficent;  and  a  multitude  of 
others  represent,  alas !  too  faithfully,  the  prime  distinction 
of  sin;  the  acting  of  a  power  against  God,  or  as  it  was  not 
made  to  act.  Could  we  only  bring  together  into  a  com- 
plete inventory  all  the  new  structures,  compositions,  in- 
ventions, shapes,  qualities,  already  produced  by  man, 
which  are,  in  fact,  the  furniture  only  of  his  sin — means  of 
self-indulgence,  instruments  of  violence,  shows  of  pride, 
instigations  of  appetite,  incitements  and  institutes  of  cor- 
rupt pleasure — all  the  leprosies  and  leper-houses  of  vice,  the 
prisons  of  oppression,  the  hospitals  and  battle  fields  of 
war,  we  should  see  a  face  put  on  the  world  which  God 
never  gave  it,  and  which  only  represents  the  bad  conver- 
sion it  has  suffered,  under  the  immense  and  ever-indus- 
trious perversities  of  sin. 

But  we  must  carry  our  search  to  a  point  that  is  deeper 
and  more  significant.  In  what  is  called  nature,  we  find 
a  large  admixture  of  signs  or  objects,  which  certainly  do 


IN    THE    NATURAL  WORLD.  187 

not  belong  to  an  ideal  state  of  beauty,  and  do  not,  there- 
fore, represent  the  mind  of  God,  whence  they  are  supposed 
to  come.  The  fact  is  patent  every  where,  and  yet  the 
superficial  and  hasty  multitudes  appear  to  take  it  for 
granted,  that  all  the  creations  of  God  are  beautiful  of 
course.  They  either  assume  it  as  a  necessary  point  of 
reverence,  or  deduce  it  as  a  point  of  reason,  that  whatever 
comes  from  God  represents  the  thought  of  God;  being 
cast  in  the  mold  of  his  thought,  which  is  divine  beauty 
itself.  Not  only  do  the  poets  and  poetasters  in  prose  go 
the  round  of  nature,  sentimentalizing  among  her  dews  and 
flowers,  and  paying  their  worship  at  her  shrine,  as  if  the 
world  were  a  gospel  even  of  beauty ;  but  our  philosophers 
often  teach  it  as  a  first  principle,  and  our  natural  theolo- 
gians assume  it  also  in  their  arguments,  that  the  forms  of 
things  must  represent  the  perfect  forms  of  the  Divine 
thought,  by  which  they  were  fashioned.  It  would  seem 
that  such  a  conceit  might  be  dissipated  by  a  single  glance 
of  revision;  for  God  is  the  infinite  beauty,  and  who  can 
imagine,  looking  on  this  or  that  half  dry  and  prosy  scene 
of  nature,  that  it  represents  the  infinite  beauty?  The  fact 
of  creation  argues  no  such  thing.  For  what  if  it  should 
happen  to  have  been  a  part  of  God's  design  in  the  work  to 
represent,  not  himself  only  as  the  pure  and  Perfect  One, 
the  immutable  throne  of  law  and  universal  order,  but 
quite  as  truly,  and  in  immediate  proximity,  to  represent 
man  to  himself;  that  he  may  see  both  what  he  is  for,  and 
what  he  is,  and  struggle  up  out  of  one  into  the  other. 
Then,  or  in  that  view,  it  would  be  the  perfection  of  the 
world,  taken  in  its  moral  adaptations,  that  it  is  not  perfect, 
and  does  not  answer  to  the  beauty  of  the  creative  mind, 
save  under  the  large  qualification  specified. 


188  CONSEQUENCES    OF    SIN, 

And  exactly  this  appears  to  be  the  true  conception  of 
the  physical  world.  What  does  it  mean,  for  example,  that 
the  vital  organizations  are  continually  seen  to  be  attempt- 
ing products  which  they  can  not  finish?  Thus  a  fruit 
tree  covers  itself  with  an  immense  profusion  of  blos- 
soms, that  drop,  and  do  not  set  in  fruit.  And  then,  of 
those  fruits  which  are  set,  an  immense  number  fall,  strew- 
ing the  ground  with  deaths — tokens  all  of  an  abortive  at- 
tempt in  nature,  if  we  call  it  nature,  to  execute  more  than 
she  can  finish.  And  this  we  see  in  all  the  growths  of  the 
world — they  lay  out  more  than  they  can  perform.  Is  this 
the  ideal  perfection  of  nature,  or  is  there  some  touch  of 
unnature  and  disorder  in  it?  Is  God,  the  Creator,  repre- 
sented in  this?  Does  he  put  himself  before  us  in  this 
manner,  as  a  being  who  attempts  more  fruits  than  he  can 
produce?  or  is  there  a  hint  in  it,  for  man,  of  what  may  come 
to  pass  in  himself?  an  image  under  which  he  may  conceive 
himself  and  fitly  represent  himself  in  language?  a  token, 
also,  and  proof  of  that  most  real  abortion,  to  which  he  may 
bring  even  his  immortal  nature,  despite  of  all  the  saving 
mercies  of  God? 

Swedenborg  and  his  followers  have  a  way  of  represent- 
ing, I  believe,  that  God  creates  the  world  through  man, 
by  which  they  understand  that  what  we  call  the  creation, 
is  a  purely  gerundive  matter — God's  perpetual  act — and 
that  he  holds  the  work  to  man,  at  every  stage,  so  as 
to  represent  him  always  at  his  present  point,  and  act  upon 
him  fitly  to^  his  present  taste.  Not  far  off  is  Jonathan 
Edward's  conception  of  God's  upholding  of  the  universep- 
it  is  in  fact  a  perpetual  reproduction;  the  creation,  so  called, 
being  to  His  person,  what  the  image  in  a  mirror  is  to  the 
person  before  it,  from  whom  it  proceeds  and  bv  whom  it 


IN    THE    NATURAL    WORLD.  189 

is  sustained.  Indeed  this  latter  conception  runs  into  the 
other,  and  becomes  identical  with  it,  as  soon  as  we  take  in 
the  fact,  that  God  is  always  being  and  becoming  to  man, 
both  in  counsel  and  feeling,  what  is  most  exactly  fit  to 
man's  character  and  want;  for,  in  that  view,  God's  image, 
otherwise  called  his  creation,  will  be  all  the  while  receiv- 
ing a  color  from  man,  and  will  so  far  be  configured  to  him. 
Accordingly,  we  look,  in  either  view,  to  see  the  Kosmos  or 
outward  frame  of  things  held  to  man,  linked  to  his  for- 
tunes to  rise  and  fall  with  him,  and  so,  under  certain 
limitations,  to  give  him  back  his  doings  and  represent  him 
to  himself — representing  God,  in  fact,  the  more  adequately 
that  it  does. 

The  doctrine  of  types  in  the  physical  world,  to  represent 
conditions  of  character  and  changes  of  fortune  in  the 
spiritual,  is  only  another  conception  of  the  same  gen- 
eral truth.  And  this  doctrine  of  types  we  know  to  be 
true  in  part;  for  language  itself  is  possible  only  in  virtue 
of  the  fact  that  physical  types  are  provided,  as  bases  of 
words,  having  each  a  natural  fitness  to  represent  some 
spiritual  truth  of  human  life ;  which  is  in  fact  the  princi- 
pal use  and  significance  of  language.  Whence  also  it 
follows  that  if  human  life  is  disordered,  perverted,  re- 
duced to  a  condition  of  unnature  by  sin,  there  must  also 
be  provided,  as  the  necessary  condition  of  language,  types 
that  represent  so  great  a  change ;  which  is  equivalent  to 
saying  that  the  fortunes  of  the  outer  world  must,  to  some 
very  great  extent,  follow  the  fortunes  of  the  occupant  and 
groan  with  him  in  his  disorders. 

Or  we  are  brought  to  a  conclusion  essentially  the  same, 
by  considering  the  complete  and  perfect  unity  of  natural 
causes;  how  they  form  a  dynamic  whole,  resting  in  an  ex 


190  CONSEQUENCES    OP    SIN, 

act  balance  of  mutual  relationship,  so  that  if  any  world, 
or  particle,  starts  from  its  orbit,  or  position,  every  other 
world  and  particle  feels  the  change.  What  then  must  fol- 
low when  the  given  force  or  substance  man,  begins  and 
for  long  ages  continues  to  act  as  he  was  not  made 
to  act;  out  of  character,  against  God,  refusing  place,  and 
breaking  out  on  every  side  from  the  general  scheme  of 
unity  and  harmony,  in  which  the  creation  was  to  be  com- 
prehended ?  What  can  his  human  disorder  be,  but  a  prop- 
agating cause  of  disorder?  what  his  deformity  within,  but 
a  soul  of  deformity  without,  in  the  surroundings  of  the 
field  he  occupies? 

And  this  again  is  but  another  version  of  the  fact  that 
the  final  causes  of  things  are  moral ;  the  arrangement  be- 
ing that  natural  causes  shall  react  upon  all  wrong-doing, 
in  retributive  diseases,  discords,  and  pains,  to  correct  and 
chasten  the  wrong;  which,  indeed,  is  the  same  thing  as  to 
say  that  the  world  was  made  to  share  the  fortunes  of  man, 
and  fall  with  him  in  his  fall. 

Whichever  of  these  views  we  take,  for  at  bottom  they 
all  coalesce  in  the  same  conclusion,  we  see,  at  a  glance, 
that,  given  the  fact  of  sin,  what  we  call  nature  can  be  no 
mere  embodiment  of  God's  beauty  and  the  eternal  order 
of  His  mind,  but  must  be,  to  some  wide  extent,  a  realm  of 
deformity  and  abortion;  groaning  with  the  discords  of  sin 
and  keeping  company  with  it  in  the  guilty  pains  of  its 
apostasy.  Even  as  the  apostle  says,  meaning  doubtless 
all  which  his  words  most  naturally  signify — "For  the 
whole  creation  groaneth  and  travaileth  in  pain  together.'' 

We  need  not  therefore  scruple  to  allow  and  also  to  main- 
tain the  judgment,  that  many  things  we  meet  are  not  beau- 
tiful; we  should  rather  look  for  many  that  are  not.  Thus 


IN    THE    NATURAL    WORLr  191 

we  have  growths  in  the  briars  and  thorns  that  do  not  rep- 
resent the  beauty  and  benignity  of  God;  but  under  his 
appointment  take  on  their  spiny  ferocity  from  man,  whose 
surroundings  they  are,  and  whose  fortunes  they  are  made 
to  participate.  The  same  may  be  said  of  loathsome  and 
disgusting  animals.  Or  we  may  take  the  pismire  race  for 
an  example — a  race  of  military  vermin,  who  fight  pitched 
battles  and  sometimes  make  slaves  of  their  captives ;  rep- 
resenting nothing  surely  in  God,  save  his  purpose  to  re- 
flect, in  keenest  mockery,  the  warlike  chivalry  and  glory 
of  man.  It  was  our  fortune  once  to  see  a  battle  of  these 
insect  heroes.  On  a  square  rod  of  ground  it  raged  for  two 
whole  days,  a  braver  field  than  Marathon,  or  Waterloo, 
covered  with  the  dead  and  dying,  and  with  fierce  enemies 
rolled  in  the  dust,  still  fighting  on  in  a  deadly  grapple  of 
halves,  after  the  slender  connection  of  their  middle  part 
had  been  completely  severed  in  the  encounter.  That  these 
creatures  image  God  in  their  fight,  can  not  be  supposed, 
save  as  God  may  reveal,  by  a  figure  so  powerful,  the 
sense  he  has  of  what  we  call  our  glory,  the  bloody  glory 
of  our  sin. 

Under  the  same  principle  that  the  world  is  linked  to 
man  and  required  to  represent  him  to  himself,  we  are 
probably  to  account  for  the  many  and  wide-spread  to- 
kens of  deformity  round  us  in  the  visible  objects  of 
nature.  "Whoever  may  once  set  his  thought  to  this  kind 
of  inquiry,  will  be  amazed  by  the  constant  recurrence  of 
deformities,  or  things  which  lack  the  beauties  of  form. 
After  all  the  fine  sentimentalities,  lavished  by  rote  and 
•without  discriminating  thought  on  the  works  and  pro- 
cesses of  nature,  he  will  be  surprised  to  find  that  the  world 
is  not  as  truly  a  realm  of  beauty,  as  of  beauty  flecked  by 


192  CONSEQUENCES    OP    SIN, 

injury.  The  growths  are  carbuncled  and  diseased,  and 
the  children  have  it  for  a  play  to  fetch  a  perfect  leaf. 
Fogs  and  storms  blur  the  glory  of  the  sky,  and  foul  days, 
rightly  so  called,  interspace  the  bright  and  fair.  The  earth 
itself  displays  vast  deserts  swept  by  the  horrid  simoom ; 
muddy  rivers,  with  their  fenny  shores,  tenanted  by  hide- 
ous alligators;  swamps  and  morasses,  spreading  out  in 
provinces  of  quagmire,  and  reeking  in  the  steam  of  death. 
In  the  kingdom  of  life,  disgusting  and  loathsome  objects 
appear,  too  numerous  to  be  recounted;  such  as  worms  and 
the  myriads  of  base  vermin,  deformed  animals,  dwarfs, 
idiots,  leprosies,  and  the  rot  of  cities  swept  by  the  plague; 
history  itself  depicting  the  mushrooms  sprouting  in  the 
bodies  of  the  unburied  dead,  and  the  jackals  howling  in 
the  chambers,  at  their  dreadful  repast.  Even  more  sig- 
nificant still  is  the  fact,  because  it  is  a  fact  that  concerns 
the  honor  even  of  our  personal  organism,  that  no  living 
man  or  woman  is  ever  found  to  be  a  faultless  model  of 
beauty  and  proportion.  When  the  sculptor  will  fashion 
a  perfect  form,  he  is  obliged  to  glean  for  it,  picking  out 
the  several  parts  of  beauty  from  a  hundred  mal-propor- 
tioned,  blemished  bodies  in  actual  life.  And  what  is  yet 
more  striking,  full  three-fourths  of  the  living  races  of  men 
are  so  ugly,  or  so  far  divested  of  beauty  in  their  mold, 
that  no  sculptor  would  ever  think  of  drawing  on  them  for 
a  single  feature! 

This  word  deformity,  which  is  properly  a  word  of  sight, 
may  be  used  too  in  its  largest  and  most  inclusive  import, 
to  cover  all  the  ground  of  the  senses,  together  with  a  whole 
family  of  words  in  de  or  dis,  that  indicate  a  relation  of  dis- 
junction— the  dis-gusts  of  the  taste  and  the  smell;  the  dis- 
easement,  or  pain  of  the  sensibility;  the  dis-cords  and  the 


IN    THE    NATURAL    WORLD.  193 

unmelodious  notes  that  storm  the  offended  ear  of  music — 
the  manifold  braying,  cawing,  screeching,  yelling  sounds, 
such  as  would  be  low  in  a  farce,  but  are  issued  still  from 
as  many  badly- voiced  pipes  in  the  great  organ  of  nature. 
And  then  besides  we  have  dis-tempers,  dis-proportions,  dis- 
tortions, dis-orders,  de-rangements,  answering  all,  shall  we 
say,  to  the  dis-location  of  our  inward  harmony,  and,  reveal- 
ing in  that  manner  the  desolating  effects  of  our  sin. 

If  it  should  be  urged  that  all  these  deformities  and  dis- 
cords are  necessary  contrasts,  to  enliven  the  beauty  and 
highten  the  music  of  nature,  it  is  enough  to  answer  that 
pain  is  as  necessary  to  joy,  eternal  pain  to  eternal  joy;  or 
better  still,  because  the  analogy  is  closer  and  more  exact, 
that  moral  deformity  is  just  as  necessary  in  God  to  the  suffi- 
cient impression  of  Ilia  moral  beauty.  Though,  if  we 
take  them  all  together  in  their  moral  import  and  uses — 
the  abortions,  the  deformed  growths  and  landscapes,  and 
the  strange  jargon  of  sounds — regarding  them  as  prepared 
by  the  Almighty  Father,  fitly  to  insphere  a  creature  super- 
natural whom  he  is  correcting  in  his  sins  and  training 
unto  Himself,  then  do  they  rise  into  real  dignity  and  reveal 
a  truly  divine  magnificence.  This,  we  say,  is  indeed  the 
tremendous  beauty  of  God;  and  the  strange,  wild  jargon 
of  the  world,  shattered  thus  by  sin,  becomes  to  us  a  mys- 
terious, transcendent  hymn.  Still  it  is  deformity,  jargon, 
death,  and  the  only  winning  side  of  it  is,  that  it  answers 
to  the  woe,  and  meets  the  want  of  our  sin. 

17 


CHAPTER   VII. 

ANTICIPATIVE    CONSEQUENCES. 

IN  the  account  offered  of  the  consequences  of  sin,  we 
have  spoken  of  these  consequences  as  effects  transpiring 
under  laws,  and  so  as  matters  post  in  respect  to  the  fact  of 
sin.  The  result  stated  coincides,  in  all  but  the  positive  or 
inflictive  form,  with  the  original  curse  denounced  on  man's 
apostasy,  as  represented  in  the  Adamic  history  or  sin- 
myth,  as  some  would  call  it,  of  the  ancient  scriptures. 
That  primal  curse,  it  is  conceived,  penetrates  the  very 
ground  as  a  doom  of  sterility,  covers  it  with  thorns  and 
thistles  and  all  manner  of  weeds  to  be  subdued  by  labor, 
makes  it  weariness  to  live,  brings  in  death  with  its  armies 
of  pains  and  terrors  to  hunt  us  out  of  life,  and  so  unpara- 
dises  the  world.  Call  it  then  a  myth,  disallow  the  notion 
of  a  positive  infliction  as  being  unphilosophical ;  still  the 
matter  of  the  change,  or  general  world-lapse  asserted  in  it, 
is  one  of  the  grandest,  most  massive,  best-attested  truths 
included  in  human  knowledge.  It  is  just  that  which 
ought  to  be  true,  under  the  conditions,  and  which  we  have 
found,  by  inspection  also,  to  be  true  as  a  matter  of  fact. 

Still  there  is  a  difficulty,  or  a  great  and  hitherto  insuffi- 
ciently explored  question,  that  remains.  It  is  the  question 
of  date  or  time;  for  when  we  speak,  as  in  the  previous 
chapter,  of  the  consequences  of  sin,  we  seem  to  imply  that, 
upon,  or  after  the  fact  of  sin,  the  physical  order  of  the 
world,  affected  by  the  shock,  underwent  a  great  change 
that  amounted  to  a  fall ;  becoming,  from  that  point  on- 
ward, a  realm  of  deformity  and  discord,  as  before  it  was 


TWO    KINDS    OP   CONSEQUENCES.  195 

not,  and  displaying,  in  all  its  sceneries  and  combinations, 
the  tokens  of  a  broken  constitution.  All  which,  it  will 
readily  occur  to  any  one,  can  not,  in  that  form,  be  true. 
For  the  sturdy  facts  of  science  rise  up  to  confront  us  in 
such  representations,  testifying  that  death,  and  prey,  and 
deformed  objects,  and  hideous  monsters,  were  in  the  world 
long  before  the  arrival  of  man.  Nay,  the  rocks  open  their 
tombs  and  show  us  that  older  curses  than  the  curse,  older 
consequences  ante-dating  sin,  had  already  set  their  marks 
on  the  world  and  had  even  made  it,  more  than  once,  an 
Aceldama  of  the  living  races. 

"I  need  scarce  say,"  remarks  Hugh  Miller,  "that  the 
paleontologist  finds  no  trace  in  nature  of  that  golden  age 
of  the  world,  of  which  the  poets  delighted  to  sing,  when 
all  creatures  lived  together  in  unbroken  peace,  and  war  and 
bloodshed  were  unknown.  Ever  since  animal  life  began 
upon  our  planet,  there  have  existed,  in  all  the  departments 
of  being,  carnivorous  classes,  who  could  not  live  but  by 
the  death  of  their  neighbors ;  and  who  were  armed,  in  con- 
sequence, for  their  destruction,  like  the  butcher  with  his 
knife  and  the  angler  with  his  hook  and  spear.'1*  This  being 
true,  the  paradisaic  history,  as  commonly  understood,  is  still 
farther  off  from  a  possible  verification,  unless  we  suppose  the 
curse  to  be  there  reported  as  a  fact  subsequent,  though 
latently  incorporate  before,  because  it  is  there  discovered, 
and  plainly  could  not  be  conceived,  at  tha,t  time,  as  the 
facts  of  future  science  may  require. 

For  the  true  solution  of  this  apparent  collision  between 
geologic  revelations  and  the  paradisaic  history,  lies  in  the 
fact  which  many  have  not  considered,  that  there  are  two 
modes  of  consequence,  or  two  kinds  of  consequences ;  those 

*  Testimony  of  the  Rocks,  p.  99. 


196  WHAT    EVIL    CONSEQUENCES 

which,  come  as  effects  under  physical  causes,  and  have 
their  time  as  events  subsequent;  and  those  which  come 
anticipatively,  or  before  the  facts  whose  consequences  they 
are,  because  of  intellectual  conditions,  or  because  intelli- 
gence, affected  by  such  facts,  apprehended  before  the 
time,  could  not  act  as  being  ignorant  of  them.  These  two 
modes  of  consequence,  and  particularly  the  latter,  now 
demand  our  attention. 

As  regards  the  former — the  consequences  of  suffering 
and  dislocation  that  follow  sin,  as  effects  in  time  subse- 
quent— there  is  happily  not  much  requiring  to  be  said ;  for 
the  truth  on  that  subject  is  familiar,  and  is  in  fact  over- 
.  much  insisted  on  by  the  modern  teachers.  Only  it  hap- 
pens that,  while  they  so  frequently  make  a  gospel  of  the 
mere  retributive  principle  thus  arrayed  against  evil,  they 
do  also  contrive  to  narrow  the  bad  consequences  of  sin  to 
a  range  so  restricted,  and  to  results  of  mischief  so  nearly 
trivial,  that  really  nothing  is  involved  in.  disobedience,  ex- 
cept in  cases  of  extreme  viciousness  and  moral  abandon- 
ment. They  do  not  conceive  such  a  thing  as  the  real  dis- 
solution of  the  primal  order  and  harmony  even  of  the 
soul,  and  the  ceasing  to  be  any  longer  a  complete  integer, 
when  it  drops  its  moral  integrity.  What  I  have  so 
abundantly  shown  in  the  previous  chapter,  they  do  not 
allow  themselves  to  see — that  any  beginning,,  or  outbreak 
of  sin  carries  with  it  the  inevitable  fact  of  a  shock  to  the 
general  state  of  order;  starting  trains  of  penal  and  retri- 
butive consequences,  which  have  no  assignable  limit,  and 
which  none  but  a  supernatural  and  divine  agency  can  re- 
verse, Any  thing  entering  into  God's  world,  or  falling 
out  in  it,  that  is  against  his  will,  breaks  of  course  the 


ARE    SUBSEQUENT    IN    TIME.  197 

crystalline  order,  and  how  far  the  fracture  will  go  no  one 
can  tell. 

When,  therefore,  we  meet  any  given  token  of  lapse,  or 
disorder,  it  may  not  be  clear  to  us,  on  mere  inspection, 
how  it  came  in,  whether  among  the  subsequent  or  the  an- 
ticipative  consequences  of  sin.  Thorns  and  thistles — did 
they  take  on  their  spiny  and  savage  armor  before  the  sin 
of  man,  or  after?  Possibly  after.  No  man  can  tell  be- 
forehand how  far  such  a  beginning  of  disobedience  and 
apostasy  from  God  might  penetrate  the  fabric,  and  poison 
the  substance,  and  so  determine  the  form  of  growths  in  the 
world ;  for,  in  a  scheme  of  perfect  reason,  any  violation  of 
wrong  travels  fast  and  far,  and  no  one  can  guess  how  far. 
But  if  the  geologist,  opening  the  hidden  registers  of  the 
world  finds,  the  portrait,  or  even  the  indisputable  analogon 
of  a  thistle  in  the  stone,  that  is  the  end  of  the  inquiry. 

The  substance  then  of  what  I  would  desire  to  say  on 
this  particular  point  is  that,  without  some  conviction  of 
'evil  and  pain  following  after  sin  as  its  necessary  effect, 
there  could  be  no  such  thing  as  a  practically  real  moral 
government  in  the  world.  That  such  evil  and  pain  do 
follow,  with  inevitable  certainty,  even  as  all  effects  follow 
after  their  causes,  we  perceive  and  almost  universally  ad- 
mit ;  for  they  are  distinguishable  in  all  the  four  great  de- 
partments of  being — the  body,  the  soul,  society,  and  the 
world.  And  since  it  is  theoretically  true  that,  in  any  per- 
fect system  of  being,  the  disturbance  of  a  particle  disturbs 
the  whole,  we  are  to  admit,  without  difficulty,  and  as  it  were 
by  intellectual  requirement,  that  evils  most  remote,  deep- 
est, widest,  and  most  comprehensive,  may  be  effects,  or  in- 
evitable sequents  of  human  transgression.  On  this  point 
our  faith  should  properly  be  shocked  by  nothing ;  for  it  is 

17* 


198  FEE-EXISTING    EVILS,    HOW    FAR 

a  fact  visible  beforehand,  all  time  apart,  that  sin  must 
be  a  grand,  all-penetrating  sacrament  of  woe  to  the  world 
that  contains  it.  And  we  shall  most  naturally  take  all 
the  evils  we  meet  to  be  the  dynamical  effects  of  sin,  till  we 
find  them  penetrating  also  the  pre- Adamite  conditions  of 
being,  and  setting  their  type  in  the  registers  of  the  geo- 
logic ages. 

We  come  now  to  the  matter  of  the  anticipative  conse- 
quences; where  it  will  be  required  of  us  to  speak  more 
carefully  and  to  dwell  longer. 

And  here  the  first  thing  to  be  noted,  as  respects  the 
consequences  of  sin  in  our  particular  world,  is  that  the 
subsequent  effects  of  the  sin  of  other  beings  might  very 
well  bring  in  disorders  here  that  anticipate  the  arrival  of 
man.  There  had  been  other  moral  beings  in  existence 
doubtless  before  the  creation  of  man.  So,  in  fact,  the 
scriptures  themselves  testify.  They  also  testify  that  some 
such  were  evil  and,  as  we  are  left  to  judge,  fixed  in  a 
reprobate  character,  by  long  courses  of  evil.  As  they  are 
shown  to  have  had  access  to  our  world,  after  we  came  in 
as  a  race  to  possess  it,  so  doubtless  they  had  been  visitors 
and  travelers  in  it,  if  we  may  so  speak,  during  all  the  long 
geologic  eras  that  preceded  our  coming — hovering  it  may 
be  in  the  smoke  and  steam,  or  watching  for  congenial 
sounds  and  sights  among  the  crashing  masses  and  grind- 
ing layers,  even  before  the  huge  monsters  began  to  wallow 
in  the  ooze  of  the  waters,  or  the  giant  birds  to  stalk 
along  the  hardening  shores.  What  they  did,  in  this  or 
that  geologic  layer  of  the  world,  we  of  course  know  not. 
As  little  do  we  know  in  what  numbers  they  appeared,  or 
by  what  deeds  of  violence  and  wrong  they  disfigured  the 


BEFERRIBLE  TO  OLDER  POPULATIONS.  199 

existing  order.  We  do  not  even  know  that  the  suc- 
cessive extinctions  of  so  many  animal  races,  and  the 
deformities  found  in  so  many  of  the  now  existing  races, 
were  not  somehow  referrible  to  the  audacity  of  their 
wrongs  and  the  bitter  woe  of  their  iniquities.  As  already 
intimated,*  the  fencing  of  spirits  may  be  an  essentially 
moral  affair — such  that  having,  by  their  very  nature,  the 
freedom  originally  of  the  physical  universe,  the  universe 
might  well  be  visited  by  all  such  myrmidons  of  evil  and, 
being  so  visited,  might  show,  as  a  necessary  consequence, 
the  tokens  of  their  evil  contact  or  inhabitation.  Indeed  it 
might  well  enough  show  such  tokens  of  their  sin  in  worlds 
they  had  never  visited ;  for  the  universe,  as  we  have  seen, 
is  a  whole,  and  a  shock  to  any  part  of  that  whole  must 
have  its  effects  of  some  kind,  in  every  other.  How  far 
the  solidarity  of  the  universe  and  its  fortunes  extends,  or 
how  many  things  it  embraces,  we  certainly  do  not  know, 
and  are  therefore  not  qualified  to  assume  that  "the  whole 
creation"  does  not  necessarily  feel  the  touch  of  every 
bad  mind  and  act,  and  suffer  some  consequent  disorder 
in  every  part.  Finding  then  tokens  of  deformity  and 
prey,  and  objects  of  disgust  appearing  in  the  world,  long 
ages  before  it  was  inhabited  by  man,  we  are  not  hastily  to 
infer  that  these  are  not  actual  consequences  of  sin.  They 
may  be  such,  in  the  strictest  terms  of  retributive  causality, 
though  not  as  related  to  the  sins  of  man.  Preceding  that, 
by  long  ages  of  time,  they  may  yet  be  subsequent  and  pe- 
nal effects,  as  related  to  older,  vaster,  outlying  populations 
of  sinners  that  had  visited,  or  sent  the  shock  of  their  sin 
into  the  world,  before  the  human  race  appeared. 

It  is  not  proposed,  however,  to  account  for  all  the  pre- 

*  Chapter  IV.,  pp.  123-128. 


200  CONSEQUENCES    PREVIOUS, 

viously  existing  marks  of  evil  in  the  world,  in  this  manner. 
It  is  most  agreeable  not  to  do  it.  For  we  shall  easily  con- 
vince ourselves  that  vast  realms  of  consequences,  and 
these  as  real  as  any,  precede  and,  in  rational  order,  ought 
-to  precede,  .their  grounds,  or  occasions.  Indeed  it  is 
the  peculiar  distinction  of  consequences  mediated  by  in- 
telligence, that  they  generally  go  before,  and  prepare  the 
coming  of  events  to  which  they  relate.  Whoever  plants 
a  state  erects  a  prison,  or  makes  the  prison  to  be  a  neces- 
sary part  of  his  plan ;  which  prison,  though  it  be  erected 
before  any  case  of  felony  occurs,  is  just  as  truly  a  conse- 
quence of  the  felonies  to  be,  as  if  it  were  erected  afterward, 
or  were  a  natural  result  of  such  felonies.  All  the  machin- 
ery of  discipline  in  a  school,  or  an  army,  is  prepared  by 
intelligence,  perceiving  beforehand  the  certain  want  of 
discipline  hereafter  to  appear,  and  is  just  as  truly  a  conse- 
quence of  the  want,  as  if  it  were  created  by  the  want 
itself,  without  any  mediation  of  intelligence. 

So  also  any  commander,  who  is  managing  a  campaign, 
and  has  gotten  hold  of  the  intended  plan  of  his  enemy, 
will  be  utterly  unable  to  project  a  plan  for  himself,  or  even 
to  order  the  manceuvers  of  a  day,  so  as  not  to  show  a  look- 
ing at  the  secret  he  has  gained,  and  also  to  prepare  in- 
numerable things,  that  are,  in  some  sense,  consequences 
of  it.  What  then  shall  we  look  for,  since  God's  whole 
plan  of  government  is,  in  some  highest  view,  a  campaign 
against  sin,  and  is  from  the  beginning  projected  as  such, 
but  that  all  the  turnings  of  his  counsels  and  shapings  of 
his  creations,  should  have  some  discoverable  reference  to 
it?  And  how,  in  that  case,  could  they  be  more  truly  and 
rigidly  consequences  of  it  ?  Indeed  all  consequences  post, 
are,  in  fact,  anticipative  first,  and  are,  as  really  existent,  in 


MEDIATED    BY    INTELLIGENCE.  201 

tno  laws  ordained  by  intelligence  to  bring  them  to  pass,  as 
they  are  in  their  actual  occurrence  in  time,  afterward.  It 
is  by  no  fiction  therefore,  and  as  little  by  any  fetch  of 
ingenuity,  that  we  speak  of  anticipative  consequences ;  for 
they  are  the  unfailing  distinction  of  every  plan  ordered 
by  intelligence ;  every  system  or  scheme,  comprehended 
in  the  molds  of  reason,  will  disclose,  in  the  remotest  and 
most  subtle  beginnings,  marks  that  relate  to  events  future, 
and  even  to  issues  most  remote. 

This  too,  so  far  from  being  any  subject  of  wonder,  is 
even  a  kind  of  necessary  incident  of  intelligence.  For 
every  thing  that  comes  into  the  view  of  intelligence,  must 
also  pass  into  the  plans  of  intelligence.  How  can  any  in- 
telligent being  frame  a  plan,  so  as  to  make  no  account  of 
what  is  really  in  his  knowledge  ?  Or  how  could  the  all- 
knowing  God  arrange  a  scheme  of  providential  order,  just  ~ 
as  if  he  did  not  know  the  coming  fact  of  sin,  eternally 
present  to  his  knowledge  ?  Mind  works  under  conditions 
of  unity,  and,  above  all,  Perfect  Mind.  "What  God  has 
eternally  in  view,  therefore,  as  the  certain  fact  of  sin,  that 
fact  about  which  all  highest  counsel  in  his  government 
must  revolve,  and  upon  the  due  management  of  which  all 
most  eventful  and  beneficent  issues  in  his  kingdom  depend, 
must  pervade  his  most  ancient  beginnings  and  crop  out 
in  all  the  layers  and  eras  of  his  process,  from  the  first 
chapter  of  creative  movement,  onward.  As  certainly  as 
sin  is  to  be  encountered  in  his  plan,  its  marks  and  conse- 
quences will  be  appearing  anticipatively,  and  all  the  grand 
arrangements  and  cycles  of  time  will  be 'somehow  prelud- 
ing its  approach,  and  the  dire  encounter  to  be  maintained 
with  it.  To  create  and  govern  a  world,  through  long  eras 
of  time,  and  great  physical  revulsions,  yet  never  discover 


202  PKEMEDITATION    OF    GOD, 

to  our  view  any  token  that  he  apprehends  the  grand  cata- 
clysm of  sin  that  is  approaching,  till  after  the  fact  is  come, 
he  must  be  much  less  than  a  wise,  all-perceiving  Mind. 
Much  room  would  be  left  for  the  doubt,  whether  he  is  any 
mind  at  all ;  for  it  is  the  way  of  mind  to  weave  all  coun- 
sel and  order  into  a  web  of  visible  unity. 

It  accords  also  with  this  general  view  of  the  subject,  as 
related  to  mind,  that  our  most  qualified  teachers  in  science 
discover  so  many  tokens  of  premeditation,  or  anticipative 
thought,  in  the  earlier  types  and  creations  of  the  world. 
"Premeditation  prior  to  creation"* — this  is  the  grand, 
intellectual  fact  which  Mr.  Agassiz  verifies  with  a  con- 
fidence so  calmly  scientific,  in  his  late  introduction  to  the 
study  of  Natural  History.  All  sciences,  he  shows,  are 
in  things  because  the  creator's  premeditative  thought  is 
there ;  every  first  thing  accordingly  shows  some  premedit- 
ative token  of  every  last.  "Enough  has  been  already 
said,"  he  remarks,  "to  show  that  the  leading  thought 
which  runs  through  the  successions  of  all  organized 
beings,  in  past  ages,  is  manifested  again  in  new  combina- 
tions, in  the  phases  of  the  development  of  living  repre- 
sentatives of  these  different  types.  It  exhibits  every 
where  the  working  of  the  same  creative  Mind,  through  all 
time,  and  upon  the  whole  surface  of  the  globe."  f  He 
passes  directly  on,  accordingly,  in  his  next  section,  to 
speak  of  the  "  Prophetic  Types  among  Animals,"  discov- 
ering, in  the  earlier  types  of  animated  being,  what  reads 
"  like  a  prophecy  "  of  all  the  types  to  come  after.  "  There 
are  entire  families,"  he  says,  "  among  the  representatives 
of  older  periods,  of  nearly  every  class  of  animals,  which, 
in  the  state  of  their  perfect  development,  exemplify  such 
*  Essay  on  Classification,  p.  9.  -J-  Ib.,  p.  116 


DISCOVEBED    IN    THE    FACTS    OF    SCIENCE;  203 

prophetic  relations,  and  afford,  within  the  limits  of  the 
animal  kingdom,  at  least,  the  most  unexpected  evidence 
that  the  plan  of  the  whole  creation  had  been  maturely 
considered,  long  before  it  was  executed."  *  All  this,  it  will 
be  observed,  by  the  mere  dry  light  of  reason  and  of  posi- 
tive science,  apart  from  any  consideration  of  a  service  to 
be  rendered  to  revealed  religion. 

Prof.  Dana,  in  like  manner,  though  with  a  somewhat  dif- 
ferent purpose,  observes,  in  "  the  survey  of  geological  facts, 
a  remarkable  oneness  of  system,  binding  together,  in  a 
single  plan  or  scheme,  the  successive  events  or  creations, 
from  the  earliest  coral  or  shell-fish  to  man."  f  The  whole 
geologic  series  or  progress  constitutes,  in  this  manner,  he 
maintains,  "  One  grand  history,  with  the  creation  of  man, 
the  last  act  in  the  drama  of  creation." 

The  point  of  conviction  reached  by  these  great  masters 
of  science,  and  stated  thus  in  terms  of  the  truest  intellec- 
tual insight,  is  still  not  the  end  of  all  reason  as  pertaining 
to  the  subject  in  question.  If  we  speak  of  "prophetic 
types  "  fulfilled  or  perfected  by  future  creations,  there  will, 
in  the  same  manner,  be  types  also  that  have  their  fulfill- 
ment after  all  creations  are  ended ;  in  the  spiritual  state  of 
men,  and  the  remotest  issues  and  last  ends  of  human  exist- 
ence. And  as  all  that  God  ordains  or  previously  creates, 
will  have  some  respect  to  these  last  ends,  and  the  condi- 
tions of  trial  and  bad  experience  through  which  they  are 
to  be  reached,  it  is  even  probable  that,  if  we  had  a  perfect 
insight  of  any  humblest  thing,  be  it  only  a  mollusc,  or  an 
insect,  we  should  find  some  subtle  type  or  reference  in  it, 
to  the  grandest  and  most  radical  facts  of  the  spiritual  his- 
tory of  the  universe.  For  the  premeditation  of  God  and 

*  Essay  on  Classificatiop  D  lit.        f  New  Englander,  Yol.  XVI,  p.  96. 


204 

the  intellectual  unity  of  his  thought  comprehend  more 
than  any  mere  matter  of  species,  or  frame  of  geological 
order ;  "viz.,  that  for  which  all  species  and  all  facts  of 
science  and  all  objects  of  scientific  study  exist. 

So  also,  if  we  speak  with  Prof.  Dana  of  a  "  remarkable 
•oneness  of  system,"  geology  is,  in  real  fact,  no  system  of 
God,  except  as  we  say  it  by  accommodation,  which  doubt- 
less he  would  also  admit ;  for  there  is  but  one  system  and 
•can  be  only  one,  as  there  is  but  one  systematizing  mind, 
and  one  last  end,  about  which  the  inferior  combinations, 
sometimes  called  systems,  revolve.  "When,  therefore,  it  is 
remarked  that  God's  one  system  visibly  comprehends  all  the 
creation,  from  coral  and  shell-fish  up  to  man,  why  not  also, 
we  ask,  to  something  farther? — to  what  man  will  do,  and 
what  will  be  done  upon  him  and  for  him,  and  finally  to  all 
that  he  will  become?  when  God's  last  end,  that  in  which 
all  system  centers,  and  for  which  it  works,  is  finally  con- 
summated. And  what  can  we  look  for,  in  this  view,  but 
that  God's  premeditations  about  sin,  the  images  it  raises, 
the  counsel  it  requires,  the  deaths  and  abortions  it  works, 
and  the  new-creations  it  necessitates,  will  be  coming  into 
view,  in  all  the  immense,  ante-dated  eras  and  mighty  revo- 
lutions of  the  geologic  process.  By  the  mere  unity  of 
God's  intellectual  system,  they  ought  to  appear,  and,  when 
they  do,  they  will  as  truly  be  consequences  of  sin  as  if 
they  were  mere  physical  eifects,  subsequent  in  time  to  the 
facts. 

There  is  also  another  account  to  be  made  of  these  an- 
ticipative  consequences  of  sin ;  viz.,  that  they  are  neces- 
sary for  great  and  important  uses,  in  the  economy  of  life, 
as  a  spiritual  concern.  Were  there  no  tokens  of  death, 
deformity,  prey,  and  abortion  in  the  geologic  eras,  previ- 


IS    UNIVEESAL. 

ous  to  man's  arrival,  and  were  it  left  us  to  believe  that  just 
then  and  there  discord  broke  loose,  and  the  whole  frame 
of  paradisaic  order  was  shaken  to  the  fall,  we  might  im- 
agine that  God  was  overtaken  by  some  shock  for  which 
he  was  not  prepared,  and  that  the  world  fell  out  of  his 
hands  by  some  oversight,  which  probably  enough  he  can 
never  effectually  repair.  But  with  so  many  tokens  of  an- 
ticipative  recognition  found  laboring,  and  heard  groaning, 
through  so  many  eras  of  deaths  and  hard  convulsions,  prior 
to  the  sin  they  represent,  we  see,  every  one  of  us,  in  our 
state  of  wrong-doing  and  denial  of  God,  that  He  under- 
stands his  work  from  the  beginning,  is  taken  by  no  sur- 
prise, meets  no  shock  for  which  He  is  unprepared,  and 
holds  every  part  of  his  kingdom,  even  from  the  founda- 
tion of  the  world,  in  fit  connection  with  the  tragic  history 
of  sin  and  salvation  afterward  to  be  transacted  in  it.  In 
part,  we  see  the  world  reduced  to  unnature,  infected 
with  disease,  shaken  by  discord,  marred  by  deformity, 
subsequently  to  the  fact  of  sin,  just  as  it  must  be  by  the 
retributive  action  of  causes,  or  by  the  false  conjunctions 
produced  by  the  wrongs  and  abuses  of  sin.  For  the  rest, 
it  was  anticipatively  disordered  for  the  sake  of  order,  or 
in  terms  of  necessary  unity  and  counsel,  as  pertaining  to 
the  Governing  Mind;  displaying  thus,  in  clearer  and 
diviner  evidence,  the  eternal  insight  and  all-comprehend- 
ing intelligence  of  His  appointments.  For,  in  being  set 
with  types  all  through  and  from  times  most  ancient,  of 
suffering  and  deformity,  prefiguring,  in  that  manner,  the 
being  whose  sublime  struggles  are  to  have  it  for  their  field, 
and  showing  him,  when  he  arrives,  how  Eternal  Fore- 
thought has  been  always  shaping  it  to  the  mold  of  his 
fortunes — thus  and  thus  only  could  he  be  fitly  assured,  in 

18 


206  GEOLOGIC    TYPES 

the  wild  chaos  of  sin,  of  any  such  Counsel,  or  Power,  as 
can  bring  him  safely  through. 

How  magnificent  also  is  the  whole  course  of  geology,  or 
the  geologic  eras  and  changes,  taken  as  related  to  the  fu- 
ture great  catastrophe  of  man,  and  the  new-creating,  super- 
natural grace  of  his  redemption.  It  is  as  if,  standing  on 
some  high  summit,  we  could  see  the  great  primordial 
world  rolling  down  through  gulfs  and  fiery  cataclysms, 
where  all  the  living  races  die ;  thence  to  emerge,  again  and 
again,  when  the  Almighty  fiat  calls  it  forth,  a  new  crea- 
tion, covered  with  fresh  populations;  passing  thus,  through 
a  kind  of  geologic  eternity,  in  so  many  chapters  of  deaths, 
and  of  darting,  frisking,  singing  life;  inaugurating  so 
many  successive  geologic  mornings,  over  the  smoothed 
graves  of  the  previous  extinct  races ;  and  preluding  in  this 
manner  the  strange  world-history  of  sin  and  redemption, 
wherein  all  the  grandest  issues  of  existence  lie.  This 
whole  tossing,  rending,  recomposing  process,  that  we  call 
geology,  symbolizes  evidently,  as  in  highest  reason  it 
should,  the  grand  spiritual  catastrophe,  and  Christian  new- 
creation  of  man;  which,  both  together,  comprehend  the 
problem  of  mind,  and  so  the  final  causes  or  last  ends  of  all 
God's  works.  What  we  see,  is  the  beginning  conversing 
with  the  end,  and  Eternal  Forethought  reaching  across  the 
tottering  mountains  and  boiling  seas,  to  unite  beginning 
and  end  together.  So  that  we  may  hear  the  grinding  lay- 
ers of  the  rocks  singing  harshly — 

Of  man's  first  disobedience  and  the  fruit 
Of  that  forbidden  tree — 

and  all  the  long  eras  of  desolation,  and  refitted  bloom  and 
beauty,  represented  in  the  registers  of  the  world,  are  but 
the  epic  in  stone,  of  man's  great  history,  before  the  time. 


OP    SIN    AND    REDEMPTION.  207 

And  of  this  we  are  the  more  impressed,  in  the  fact  so 
powerfully  shown  by  Mr.  Agassiz,  that  the  successive  new 
populations  of  the  geologic  eras  are,  beyond  a  question 
fresh  creations  of  God,  summoned  into  being  by  his  act, 
and  fashioned  in  the  molds  of  his  thought ;  impossible  to 
be  created  or  fashioned,  by  any  existing  laws  and  forces 
in  nature.  He  does  not  say  distinctly  that  they  are  super- 
natural creations,  he  might  not  so  understand  the  word,  as 
to  be  clear  of  all  disrespect  in  regard  to  it,  but  the  fresh 
act  of  creation  which  he  affirms  and  even  scientifically 
proves,  exactly  answers  to  our  definition  of  the  supernat- 
ural, as  being  the  action  of  some  agent  on  the  conditions 
of  nature  from  without  those  conditions,  and  so  as  to  pro- 
duce results  which  the  laws  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature 
could  not  produce.  What  a  consideration  then  is  it  that 
the  great  question  of  the  supernatural,  which  is  now  put 
in  issue,  and  upon  which  depends  even  the  faith  of  Chris- 
tianity, as  a  grand  supernatural  movement  of  God  on  the 
world,  is  settled,  over  and  over  again,  and  the  verdict  as 
many  times  recorded  in  the  rocks  of  the  world ! 

In  these  great  anticipative  facts  of  the  world,  it  is  very 
nearly  impossible  to  resist  the  conviction  of  the  eternal 
and  original  subserviency  even  of  its  solid  material  struc- 
ture to  religion,  and  especially  to  Christianity.  And  ex- 
actly this  ought  to  be  true,  if  the  Christ  and  his  religion 
be  such,  and  so  related  to  the  creation,  as  we  suppose  him 
to  be.  All  God's  most  ancient  works  are  of  course  to  be 
found  thus  in  the  interest  of  Christianity,  answering  to  it 
from  their  distant  past,  types  of  its  coming  in  the  distant 
future,  one  with  it  in  design,  as  being  issues  of  the  same 
Eternal  Mind. 

It  is  difficult  also  to  resist  the  conviction  of  a  use  more- 


208  DEFORMITIES    INCREASE, 

specific  and  pointed  than  those  to  which  we  have  referred 
Thus,  in  respect  to  misshapen  monsters  and  deformed 
growths,  it  is  a  remarkable  fact  that,  as  the  layers  of  ge- 
ology rise,  and  creatures  are  produced  that  stand  higher  in 
the  scale  of  organic  perfection,  the  number  of  deformities 
and  retrograde  shapes  is  multiplied.  This  fact  has  been 
strikingly  exhibited  by  Hugh  Miller,  in  refutation  of  "the 
development  theory.  It  permits  another  use  taken  as  a 
moral  type  of  human  history.  Thus  the  serpent  race 
makes  no  appearance,  he  observes,  till  we  ascend  to  the 
tertiary  formation,  and  there  it  wriggles  out  into  being, 
contemporaneously  with  the  more  stately  and  perfect 
order  of  mammalia.  "When  the  mammoth  stalks 
abroad  as  the  gigantic  lord  of  the  new  creation,  the  ser- 
pent creeps  out  with  him,  on  his  belly,  with  his  bag  of 
poison  hid  under  the  roots  of  his  feeble  teeth,  spinning 
out  three  or  four  hundred  lengths  of  vertebrae,  and  having 
his  four  rudimental  legs  blanketed  under  his  skin;  a 
mean,  abortive  creature,  whom  the  angry  motherhood  of 
nature  would  not  go  on  to  finish,  but  shook  from  her  lap 
before  the  legs  were  done,  muttering,  ominously,  "  cursed  art 
thou  for  man's  sake  above  all  cattle ;  upon  thy  belly  shalt 
thou  go  and  dust  shalt  thou  eat  all  the  days  of  thy  life," — 
powerful  type  of  man,  the  poison  of  his  sin,  the  degrada- 
tion of  his  beauty  under  it,  the  possible  abortion  of  *his 
noble  capacities  and  divine  instincts ! 

It  is  also  shown  by  Miller,  in  the  same  manner,  that  the 
fishes  lost  ground,  or  grew  deformed  in  organization,  as 
the  human  era  drew  nigh.*  Eegarding  man  as  the  highest 
form  of  organization,  having  a  head,  neck,  two  hands,  and 
two  feet — the  latter  answered  by  the  four  legs  of  the  beasts, 

*  Footprints  of  the  Creator,  pp.  183-191. 


AS    THE    HUMAN    ERA    APPROACHES          209 

the  two  wings  and  legs  of  the  birds,  and  the  four  fins  of  the 
fishes — every  creature  will  be  most  perfect  inform,  when  his 
parts  are  adjusted  most  nearly  according  to  the  human  analo- 
gies; and  it  is  found  that  all  the  first  fishes  were  actually  in 
this  type  of  agreement.  In  the  second  formation,  the  for- 
ward fins  are  found  to  have  slid  up,  not  seldom,  and  stuck 
themselves  close  upon  the  head,  leaving  no  neck ;  much 
as  if  a  man  were  to  appear  with  his  arms  fastened  to  his 
head,  close  behind  his  ears.  In  a  later  formation,  both  fins, 
representing  hands  and  feet,  have  mounted  into  the  same 
position ;  and,  as  if  this  were  uncomfortable,  some  races 
have  dropped  a  pair  altogether.  Then,  next,  in  the  chalk 
formation,  where  the  nearest  vicinage  to  man  is  attained, 
appears  the  remarkable  order  that  includes  the  plaice,  tur- 
bot,  halibut,  and  flounder;  the  two  latter  of  which  are  fa- 
miliar in  our  American  waters.  They  have  the  four  fins 
stuck  close  upon  the  head.  They  are  capsized  so  as  to 
swim  on  the  flat  side.  The  mouth  is  twisted  so  as  to  ac- 
commodate their  false  position.  The  two  sides  of  the  jaw 
do  not  match,  one  being  much  larger  and  having  three  or 
four  times  as  many  teeth  as  the  other.  The  backbone  is. 
lateral,  occupying  one  side  of  the  body.  One  eye  is  fixed 
in  the  middle  of  the  forehead,  and  the  other,  which  is  much 
smaller,  is  thrust  out  upon  one  of  the  side  promontories 
of  the  face. 

What  now  does  this  strange  process  of  deformity,  chroni- 
cled in  the  rocks  of  the  world,  signify?  What  but  that 
God  is  preparing  the  field  for  its  occupant;  setting  it  with 
types  of  obliquity  that  shall  match,  and  faithfully  figure  to 
man  the  obliquity  and  deformity  of  his  sin  ?  Now  then  he  at 
last  appears,  the  lord  of  the  creation,  a  being  supernatural,, 
clothed  in  God's  image,  a  power  to  be  trained  up  to  great- 
IB* 


210  USES    OP    SUCH    DEFORMITIES. 

ness  and  glory — only  he  will  find  his  way  to  the  magnifi- 
cent destiny  of  character  appointed  him,  by  struggling  on, 
through  falls,  disorders,  and  perishing  abortions,  and  de- 
formities of  misdoing,  that  implicate  the  whole  creation, 
causing  it  to  groan  and  travail  with  him  in  his  trial. 

It  will  signify  much  to  such  a  being,  and  especially  in 
the  advanced  ages  of  time,  when  he  seems  to  be  conquering 
the  world  by  his  sciences,  to  find  that,  as  the  creation  of  God 
was  rising  in  order,  and  higher  forms  of  life  were  appear- 
ing, in  a  series  to  be  consummated  or  crowned  by  the  ap- 
pearing of  man,  tokens  also  of  retrogradation,  abortion, 
defect,  deformity,  were  also  beginning  to  appear;  as  if  to 
foretoken  the  moral  history  he  will  begin,  and  the  humilia- 
tions through  which  he  will  require  to  be  led.  Coming  in 
originally  as  lord  and  occupant  to  have  dominion,  and 
taking  possession  of  it  finally  in  the  higher  dominion  of 
science,  a  most  strange,  powerfully  humbling  lesson  meets 
him,  exactly  suited  to  his  want,  and  one  that  ought  to 
moderate  all  undue  conceit  of  science  in  him,  and  temper 
him  to  that  teachable  state  of  inquiry  that  allows  the  no- 
bler and  diviner  truths  of  Christianity  to  visit  his  heart. 
What  does  it  mean — let  any  student  of  nature  answer — 
what  does  it  mean  that  a  Perfect  Mind,  whose  very  thoughts 
are  beauty,  generates  in  the  same  era  and  side  by  side  with 
man,  such  outrageous  deformities  as  we  see,  for  example,  in 
the  halibut  species  ?  Here  is  a  deep  lesson,  worthy  of  much 
study.  There  is  plainly  no  account  to  be  made  of  such  ap- 
pearances, or  facts,  till  we  bring  in  the  sovereignty  of  moral 
ideas,  and  assume  the  necessity  of  moral  types  and  lessons. 

On  the  whole,  as  the  result  of  this  inquiry  into  the 
anticipative  consequences  of  sin,  we  most  naturally  take 
up  the  conviction,  that  the  world,  or  what  we  call  the  ere 


PANTHEISTIC    VIEW    OF    THEM.  211 

ation,  is  not  so  nracli  a  completed  fact  as  a  conatus,  strug- 
gling up  concomitantly  with  the  powers  that  are  doing 
battle  in  it  for  a  character;  falling  with  them  in  their  fall, 
rising  with  them  or  to  rise,  to  a  condition,  finally,  of  com- 
plete order  and  beauty.  There  is  much  to  be  said  for  such 
an  expectation,  and  it  appears  to  be  just  what  is  held  up, 
in  the  promise  of  a  new  heavens  and  earth,  wherein  dwell- 
eth  righteousness. 

The  pantheistic  form  of  naturalism,  it  is  well  known, 
makes  a  very  different  account  of  the  abortions  and  de- 
formities of  the  world,  and  also  of  its  future  possibilities. 
It  assumes,  for  a  fact,  that  nature  is  an  incomplete  or  par- 
tially developed  form  of  being,  going  on  toward  perfec- 
tion, under  laws  of  development,  contained  in  itself;  there- 
fore necessarily  plunging  into  mischances,  and  producing 
uncomely,  or  unperfect  fruits.  Accordingly  God,  who  is 
in  fact  the  all  of  nature,  is  a  tardy  but  sublime  Naturus, 
who  is  sometime  about  to  be,  if  he  can  attain  to  a  more 
complete  consciousness  in  his  children,  and  be  cleared  of 
the  blundering  process  of  development  by  which  necessity  is 
at  work  to  shape  him  into  order.  Meantime,  we  ourselves 
are  blundering  on  with  him,  they  suppose,  undergoing  a  like 
development.  What  we  called  sin,  before  we  became  phi- 
losophers, we  now  call  development,  and  excuse  ourselves 
from  all  blame  in  it,  because  we  are  only  parts  of  nature, 
subject  to  her  laws;  parts,  that  is,  of  God,  and  subject  to 
the  eternal  fate  that  rules  him. 

That  a  soul,  pressed  down  by  the  great  questions  of  ex- 
istence, should  sometime  reel  into  this  gulf,  is  scarcely  a 
subject  of  wonder;  but  no  healthy,  manly  soul,  none  but 
one  that  is  hag-ridden  by  the  dark  and  spectral  difficul- 
ties of  the  world,  will  long  stay  in  it.  There  is  in  the 


212  PANTHEISTIC    VIEW    OF    THEM, 

scheme,  at  first-  view,  a  certain  imposing  air  of  rational 
magnificence — it  includes  so  much,  it  handles  even  God 
and  his  mystery  so  coolly,  and  clears  the  question  of  evil 
by  a  solution  so  easy. 

But  after  all  it  is  not  cleared.  We  have  called  our  con- 
sciousness a  fool,  it  is  true,  in  reporting  such  a  thing  as 
sin,  and  have  taken  the  police  of  our  souls  into  custody  to 
escape  the  conviction  of  it,  and  still  the  sin  is  here — in  us 
and  around  us.  We  can  not  act  our  part,  for  any  two 
hours  of  our  life,  without  assuming  its  reality.  What  then 
becomes  of  our  great  philosophy,  when,  amusing  itself  thus 
in  its  lofty  airs  of  reason,  it  is  yet  confronted  every  mo- 
ment by  the  plain,  simple  denial  and  even  scorn  of  our 
consciousness? 

With  this  too  comes  the  argument  of  our  woe.  The 
air  of  such  a  creed  is  too  thin  to  support  our  life.  There 
is  no  object  meeting  us  to  fill  our  want,  there  is  no  mean- 
ing, or  heart,  in  the  mute,  dead  All ;  nothing  in  existence 
to  give  it  significance,  or  inspire  any  great  act  or  senti- 
ment. We  live  in  a  disabled,  stunted  subjectivity.  The 
inspiration  of  faith  is  replaced  by  the  impotence  of  con- 
ceit. The  world  is  a  blunder,  consciousness  is  a  lie,  the 
dark  things  of  sin  are  developments,  and  the  All  is  a  Uni- 
versal Mockery.  And  then  what  remains  but  to  go  back 
and  set  up  again  the  great  first  truth,  which  no  mortal  can 
spare  for  a  day,  that  whatever  is  wanted,  is — therefore  God, 
the  Living  God  shall  be  our  faith ;  for  Him  we  want,  as 
the  complemental  good,  without  which  existence  is  but  a 
name  for  starvation. 

How  many  things  too  are  there  in  the  world,  after  all, 
that  can  nowise  be  accounted  for  by  this  pantheistic 
theory.  If  the  disorders  and  deformities  of  nature  are  God 


UNREASONABLE    AND    UNSATISFACTORY.  213 

in  partial  development,  how  is  it  conceivable  that  any 
being  in  a  state  so  raw,  could  ever  have  organized  such 
complicated  structures — human  bodies  for  example — 
where  the  design  is  so  evident,  the  parts  so  many  and 
delicate,  the  offices  so  manifold,  the  unity  so  perfect. 
It  is  inconceivable  that  any  power — call  it  God,  or  nature, 
or  by  whatever  name — capable  of  constructing  an  organiza- 
tion so  wonderful,  should  still  be  struggling  up  into  order, 
through  such  grotesque  and  misbegotten  shapes  as  are  here 
accounted  for,  by  the  necessary  imperfection  of  its,  or  his 
development;  composing  first  the  glorious  order  of  the 
astronomic  mechanism,  then  faltering  afterward  in  the 
absurd  composition  of  a  flounder;  able  to  fashion  a  crea- 
ture of  reason,  but  not  to  stand  the  criticism  of  reason; 
able  to  start  new  races  of  living  creatures  in  the  successive 
eras  of  geology,  but  having  yet  no  will  to  start  any  thing, 
apart  from  the  control  of  fate.  And  what  can  such  a  doc- 
trine make  of  Jesus  Christ,  what  place  does  it  provide  in 
the  world  for  such  a  being?  If  nature  can  develop  noth- 
ing perfect;  if,  by  reason  of  inherent  defect,  it  must  needs 
develop  itself  in  blunders  of  abortion,  deformity,  and  pain ; 
will  it  still  suffice  to  form  the  mind,  fashion  the  beauty, 
finish  the  character  of  a  Jesus? 

But  I  am  assuming  here  a  superiority  and  perfection  of 
order  in  the  character  of  Jesus,  that  may  not  be  admitted 
by  the  pantheist,  and  as  the  question  is  hereafter  to  be  dis- 
cussed, and  will  be  made  a  point  of  consequence  in  the 
argument,  I  desist  for  the  present ;  only  requiring  it  of 
such  as  look  for  a  God  in  development,  to  answer  how 
their  blind  force,  called  nature,  staggering  on  through  the 
disorders,  abortions,  and  deformities  of  so  many  ages,  and 
even  falling  into  retrogradations  as  remarkable  as  its  im- 


214      THE    IMMENSE    SIGNIFICANCE    OF    SIN, 

provements,  can  be  imagined  to  have  produced  such  a  soul 
and  character  as  that  of  Jesus ;  a  being,  whether  perfect 
or  not,  so  high,  so  peculiar,  original,  pure,  wise,  great  in 
goodness  ? 

In  this  and  the  preceding  chapter,  we  have  now  traced 
the  consequences  of  sin :  there  the  consequences  that  must 
needs  follow  it,  as  effects  their  causes,  showing  what  results 
of  mischief  and  disorder  it  reveals  in  the  soul,  the  body, 
society,  and  the  world ;  here  accounting  for  a  large  display 
of  correspondent  facts  in  the  geologic  history  precedent, 
or  before  the  arrival  of  man,  showing  that  they  still  are 
as  truly  consequences  of  the  fact  of  sin  as  the  others, 
being  only  just  those  marks  that  God's  intelligence,  plan- 
ning the  world  and  shaping  it,  even  from  eternity,  to  the 
uses  and  issues  of  a  trial  comprehending  sin,  must  needs 
display.  Sin,  it  will  be  seen,  is,  in  this  view,  a  very  great, 
world-transforming,  world-uncreating  fact,  and  no  such 
mere  casualty,  or  matter  by  the  way,  as  the  superficial 
naturalism,  or  half  naturalistic  Christianity  of  our  time 
supposes.  It  is  that  central  fact,  about  which  the  whole 
creation  of  God  and  the  ordering  of  his  providential  and 
moral  government,  revolves.  The  impression  of  many 
appears  to  be,  that  sin  is  this  or  that  particular  act  of 
wrong,  which  men  sometimes  do,  but  which  most  men  do 
not,  unless  at  distant  intervals ;  and  who  can  imagine  that 
any  thing  very  serious  depends  on  these  rather  exceptional 
misdeeds,  when,  on  the  whole,  the  account  is  balanced  by 
so  many  shows  of  virtue  ?  The  triviality  and  shallowness 
of  such  conceptions  are  hardly  to  be  spoken  of  with 
patience.  It  is  not  seen  that  when  a  man  even  begins  to 
sin  he  must  needs  cast  away  the  principle,  first,  of  all 


IS    THUS    DISCOVEEED.  215 

holy  obedience,  and  go  down,  thus,  into  a  general  lapse 
of  condition,  to  be  a  soul  broken  loose  from  principle 
and  separated  from  the  inspirations  of  God.  Only  a  very 
little  philosophy  too,  conceiving  the  fact  that  sin  is  the 
acting  of  a  substance,  man,  as  he  was  not  made  to  act, 
must  suffice  to  the  discovery  that,  in  a  system,  or  scheme 
of  perfect  order,  it  will  start  a  ferment  of  discord  among 
causes,  that  will  propagate  itself  in  every  direction,  carry- 
ing wide-spread  desolation  into  the  remotest  circles.  The 
whole  solidarity  of  being  in  the  creation,  physical  and 
spiritual,  is  necessarily  penetrated  by  it  and  configured  to 
it.  Character,  causes,  things  prior  and  post,  all  that  God 
embraces  in  the  final  causes  of  existence,  somehow  feel 
it,  and  the  whole  creation  groans  and  travails  for  the  pain 
of  it.  The  true  Kosmos,  in  the  highest  and  most  per- 
fectly ideal  sense  of  that  term,  does  not  exist.  Nature  is 
become  unnature,  and  stopping  at  the  point  reached, 
which  of  course  we  do  not,  we  must  even  say  that  the 
creation  of  God  is  a  failure. 

But  there  is  an  objection  to  be  anticipated  here  which 
requires  our  attention,  before  we  dismiss  this  part  of  our 
subject.  It  is  that  no  proper  Kosmos,  no  crystalline  order 
of  nature,  according  to  the  view  stated  in  this  chapter,  has 
ever  yet  existed.  For,  if  we  speak  of  the  state  of  unna- 
ture as  a  consequence  of  sin,  that  state  of  unnature  has 
existed,  in  part,  or  as  far  as  it  should,  anticipatively, 
through  all  the  precedent  eras  and  geologic  processes  of 
the  world.  The  true  ideal  system  of  nature,  therefore,  has 
never  existed,  and  there  was  never  any  such  condition,  or 
chime  of  order  to  fall  from,  or  to  shatter  by  sin,  as  we  are 
trying  all  the  while  to  suppose.  All  which  is  certainly 
true,  if  we  must  go  entirely  back  of  God's  purposes  and 


216  THE    KOSMOS    STILL    EXISTS. 

beyond  them  to  find  it ;  for  what  we  have  been  tracing  as 
the  anticipative  consequences  of  sin  is  nothing  but  the 
working  of  his  ancient  counsel  concerning  it.  But  the 
real  truth  is  that  nature,  original  and  true  nature,  has  ex- 
isted and  does  now  exist ;  for,  if  we  call  our  present  state, 
as  we  truly  should,  a  condition  of  unnature,  we  mean  by 
it  nothing  more  than  that  the  causes  included  in  pure 
nature  are  working  now  more  or  less  retributively,  pain- 
fully, diseasedly,  and  so  as  to  create  a  state  of  dislocation 
in  the  outward  harmonies ;  a  state  of  incapacity  and  bond- 
age in  the  spiritual  aspirations  of  the  soul.  Nature  is  un- 
nature, when  her  causes  are  acting  retributively — they  are 
not,  in  such  cases,  discontinued,  or  thrown  out  of  their 
law ;  but  they  act,  in  their  law  and  under  it,  as  perfectly 
and  systematically  as  ever.  The  unnaturalness  of  our  pres- 
ent state  under  sin  consists,  not  in  the  fact  that  nature  is 
gone  by,  or  is  broken  up,  but  only  in  the  fact  that  her  causes 
are  all  at  work  on  the  contrary  ingredient,  sin.  It  is  as  if 
a  good  and  healthy  stomach  were  at  work  upon  a  stone,  to 
digest  it — still  it  is  acting  by  its  own  laws  and  powers,  as 
truly  as  if  the  stone  were  meat,  though  its  acting  is  only 
a  throe  of  distress.  Were  every  thing,  indeed,  now  rolling 
on,  in  sweetest  bonds  of  harmony,  according  to  the 
pure  ideal  of  what  we  call  nature,  nothing  of  bad  conse- 
quence or  penal  and  retributive  action  any  where  appear- 
ing in  it,  no  disorder  of  sin  visible  any  where  as  a  fact 
of  anticipation,  still  nature  would  not  be  more  truly  extant 
than  now ;  for  the  disorder  and  unnature  we  speak  of  are 
really  order  and  nature  chastising  the  false  fact,  sin; 
which  process  of  chastisement  and  groaning  we  call  unna- 
ture, only  because  it  does  not  answer,  thus  far,  to  the  ideal 
working  of  the  scheme,  disturbed  by  no  such  enemy 


NATURE    AS    A    WHOLE,  217 

of  God  and  all  good  as  it  has  here  met.  Nor  does  it  make 
any  the  least  difference,  except  with  some  speculative 
wordsman,  grubbing  under  space  and  time,  whether  death 
and  prey  and  other  like  consequences  of  sin  began  to 
work,  before  the  arrival  here  of  man,  or  only  after.  If 
God's  Whole  Plan  respects  the  fact  of  sin  before  the  fact, 
the  scheme  of  nature  was  none  the  less  real  or  perfect, 
because  of  the  unnature  working  anticipatively  in  it,  any 
more  than  it  follows  that  the  unnature  subsequent  has  dis- 
continued nature,  whose  retaliatory  action  it  really  is,  and 
nothing  more. 

Unnature  then — this  is  our  conclusion — a  far-reaching, 
all-comprehensive  state  of  unnature,  is  the  consequence  of 
sin.  It  mars  the  body,  the  soul,  society,  the  world,  all 
time  before  and  after.  What  an  argument  then  have  we, 
and  especially  from  the  ante-dated  tokens  of  evil,  for  the 
belief  that  God's  original  plan  comprehends  a  rising  side, 
an  economy  supernatural,  that  shall  complement  the  dis- 
order and  fall  of  nature,  having  power  to  roll  back  its  cur- 
rents of  penal  misery  and  bring  out  souls,  into  the  estab- 
lished liberty  and  beauty  of  holiness.  How  manifest  is  it 
in  the  world's  birth,  that  God,  from  the  first,  designs 
it  for  a  second  birth;  some  grand  palingennesia  that  shall 
raise  the  fall  of  nature  and  make  existence  fruitful.  It 
has  been  a  great  fault,  as  was  just  now  intimated,  that  we 
have  made  so  little  of  sin.  It  is  either  nothing,  or  else  it 
is  a  great  deal  more  than  it  is  conceived  to  be  by  the  mul- 
titude who  admit  its  existence.  The  mental  and  moral 
philosophers  make  nothing  of  it,  going  on  to  construct 
their  sciences,  so  called,  precisely  as  if  the  soul  had  re- 
ceived no  shock  of  detriment;  and  even  the  most  ortho- 
dox theologians  do  scarcely  more  than  score  it  with  guilty 

19 


218  BECOME    UNNATUBE. 

conviction,  regarding  it  seldom  as  a  dynamic  force,  and 
then  with  a  comprehension  too  restricted  to  allow  any 
true  impression,  of  its  import.  Hence,  in  great  part,  the 
general  incredulity  in  regard  to  the  supernatural  facts  of 
Christianity.  There  can  be  nothing  supernatural,  we  think, 
because  it  would  violate  the  integrity  of  nature.  The  in- 
tegrity of  nature !  What  but  a  world  of  unnature  has  it 
become  already?  And  what  has  sent  these  hard  pangs 
into  it  and  through  it  but  a  supernatural  force,  even  the 
human  will ;  for  this,  we  have  seen,  is  a  power  supernat- 
ural, as  truly  as  God,  though  not  equal  in  degree ;  able  to 
act  on  the  lines  of  causes  and  vary  their  conjunctions  from 
without,  even  as  He  is  represented  in  the  Christian  truth  to 
do.  Hence  the  disorder  and  disease;  hence  the  groan- 
ing and  travailing  in  pain  together  of  the  whole  creation — 
it  is  all  the  supernatural  work,  the  bad  miracle  of  sin. 
No  other  name  will  fitly  name  it.  Indeed,  if  there  should 
be,  somewhere  in  the  universe,  a  race  of  beings  that  have 
never  sinned,  and  they  should  have  it  set  before  them,  in 
all  its  consequences  to  the  physical  order  of  things,  they 
would  look  upon  it,  we  suspect,  as  a  miraculous  agency, 
exerted  in  God's  universe  opposite  to  himself.  And  they 
would  begin,  we  fear,  to  say  with  Mr.  Hume,  unless  they 
were  better  philosophers  than  he,  that  such  a  miracle  is 
wholly  incredible;  that  the  confidence  they  have  in  the 
beneficent,  harmonious  action  of  nature,  is  too  strong  to  be 
broken  by  any  possible  testimony  to  such  doings.  There- 
fore this  tremendous,  all-revolutionizing  miracle  must  be  a 
fiction. 

Of  course  it  is  not  a  miracle.  It  is  only  a  fact  super- 
natural, a  grand  assault  of  man's  supernatural  agency  upon 
the  world.  We  shall  speak  more  definitely  of  miracles 


IS    THERE    TO    BE    A    REMEDY?  219 

hereafter.  For  the  present,  we  only  say  that  the  super- 
natural agency  of  God  in  the  world's  redemption,  is  now 
shown  to  be  most  clearly  wanted ;  and  we  do  not  perceive 
wherein  it  is  more  incredible  that  God  should  act,  in  his 
way,  upon  the  lines  of  natural  causes,  than  that  we  should 
do  it,  in  ours.  Of  course  he  will  act  with  a  higher  sover- 
eignty, worthy  of  himself.  His  divine  supernatural  power 
will  be  divine,  our  human  will  be  human.  If  we  have 
broken  or  clouded  the  crystal  and  can  not  restore  its  trans- 
parency, he  can.  If  we  bring  deformity,  he  will  bring 
beauty.  If  we  die,  he  will  bid  us  live.  Will  he  do  this? 
That  is  now  the  question  that  remains. 


CHAPTER    VIII. 

NO  REMEDY  IN  DEVELOPMENT,   OR  SELF-REFORMATION. 

WE  are  now  at  the  point  of  catastrophe  in  God's  plan, 
where  it  is  next  in  order  to  look  about  for  some  remedial 
agency,  or  dispensation,  that  shall  restore  the  lapse  and 
bring  out  those  results  of  order  and  happiness,  that  were 
proposed  by  God,  as  we  must  believe,  in  his  act  of  crea- 
tion. Are  we  then  shut  up  to  nature  and  the  hope  that 
she  will  surmount  her  own  catastrophe,  or  may  we  believe 
that  her  inherent  weakness  will  be  complemented  by  a  su- 
pernatural and  divine  movement,  that  shall  organize  a  new 
economy  of  life? 

The  former  is  the  ground  taken  by  all  the  naturalizing 
classes  of  our  time.  Nothing  can  take  place,  they  say, 
which  is  not  operated  under  and  by  the  laws  of  nature. 
To  believe  that  any  thing  can  take  place  which  is  from 
without,  or  from  above  the  laws  of  nature,  is  unphilosoph- 
ical  and  savors  of  credulity.  That  there  is  such  a  thing 
as  misdirection  they  will  admit,  and  some  will  admit  also 
the  fact  of  sin ;  and  it  will  be  agreed  by  them  all  that,  in 
consequence  either  of  misdirection,  or  of  sin,  there  are 
a  great  many  apparent  disasters  and  disorders  in  the  world, 
or  especially  in  human  society,  that  want  some  kind  of 
remedy.  Our  present  object  is  to  look  into  their  princi- 
pal remedies,  or  grounds  of  expected  restoration,  and  try 
what  virtue  there  is  in  them.  They  are  two,  or  presented 
under  two  distinct  forms,  both  of  which  may  be  taken  as 
rival  gospels  opposite  to  Christianity. 

By  the  class  who  formally  reject,  or  ignore  Christianity, 


NO    REMEDY    IN    DEVELOPMENT.  221 

development  is  regarded  as  the  universal  panacea — all  the 
apparent  evils  of  the  world  are  to  be  cured  by  develop- 
ment. 

The  class  who  professedly  teach  and  believe  the  Chris- 
tian gospel,  reducing  it  still  to  a  mere  scheme  of  ethics,  or 
natural  virtue,  rely  more  on  the  individual  will  to  be  ex- 
erted in  self-government,  self-culture,  and  the  doing  of 
justice,  mercy,  and  other  good  works. 

Of  these  rival  gospels,  both  from  within  the  terms  of 
nature,  I  will  now  speak,  in  their  order. 

L  Of  development,  or  as  it  is  often  phrased,  the  natural 
progress  of  the  race. 

The  world  is  just  now  taken,  as  never  before,  with  ideas 
of  progress.  The  human  race,  it  is  conceived,  exists  un- 
der laws  of  progress.  The  philosophers,  or  would-be  phi- 
losophers, have  even  undertaken  to  reduce  the  laws  of 
progress  to  a  scientific  statement.  They  conceive  that  all 
the  advanced  races  of  mankind  began  at  the  level  of  the 
savage  state,  and  have  been  set  forward  to  their  present 
pitch  of  culture,  civilization,  wealth,  and  liberty,  by  laws 
of  development  in  mere  nature.  The  multitude  go  after 
them,  embracing  the  welcome  idea  of  progress  only  the 
more  enthusiastically,  that  they  are  so  much  taken  with 
the  new  word  development,  conceiving  that  there  is  great 
science  in  it,  or,  at  least,  some  unknown  kind  of  power. 
If  there  are  any  evils,  or  bitter  woes  in  society,  develop- 
ment is  going  to  cure  them ;  for  the  laws  of  development 
are  at  work  to  produce  progress,  and  they  will  as  certainly 
do  it,  as  the  laws  of  matter  will  determine  its  motions. 
All  crime  and  sin  are  going  finally  to  be  cured  in  this 
manner,  and  character  is  going  finally  to  blossom,  on  the 
broken  stock  of  nature,  even  as  flowers  are  developed  out 

19* 


222  THE    TRUE    DEVELOPMENT 

of  stocks  not  broken,  and  roots  not  poisoned  by  disease. 
Finding  thus  a  gospel  of  progress  in  the  world  itself  and 
the  mere  laws  of  existence,  what  need  of  any  such  anti- 
quated mythology  as  the  Christian  gospel  brings  us?  Or, 
if  the  argument  is  not  openly  stated  in  this  manner,  still 
it  is  virtually  adopted;  for  how  many  that  suppose  Chris- 
tianity to  be  true,  still  have  it  only  as  a  thing  by  the  way,  a 
straw  floating  down  this  flood  and  passing  on  with  us,  to  see 
the  brave  work  human  progress  is  doing.  If  it  is  not 
called  a  myth  or  wild  tradition,  still  the  really  trusted  gos- 
pel is  phrenology,  chemistry,  and  the  other  new  sciences, 
with  their  grand  economic  creations,  such  as  telegraphs, 
railroads,  steamboats,  and  the  like — (not  omitting  the  new 
and  better  bible  discovered  in  the  oracles  of  necromancy;) 
and  these  are  going  at  last  to  raise  the  world,  no  thanks 
to  Christianity,  into  a  state  of  universal  brotherhood  and 
felicity !  The  lowest  charlatans  and  some  of  the  most  culti- 
vated savans  hold  much  the  same  language,  and  trust  in 
the  same  gospel  of  development. 

Now  that  there  is,  or  should  be  such  a  thing  as  devel- 
opment, we  certainly  admit.  All  the  human  faculties  are 
capable  of  development  by  exercise  or  training,  and  every 
human  being  will,  of  necessity,  be  developed  to  a  certain 
degree,  both  in  mind  and  body,  by  the  growth  of  years 
and  the  necessary  struggles  of  life.  But  that  human  so- 
ciety was  ever  carried  forward,  by  a  single  shade,  in  the 
matter  of  religious  virtue,  under  mere  laws  of  natural  de- 
velopment, we  utterly  deny.  It  is  even  a  fair  subject  of 
doubt  whether  any  nation,  or  race  of  men,  was  ever  ad- 
vanced in  civilization  by  inherent  laws  of  progress.  Cer- 
tain it  is  that  no  individual  was  ever  cleared  of  sin  by  de- 
velopment, or  restored  even  proximately  to  the  state  of 


INCLUDES    EEGENEKATION.  223 

primal  order  and  uprightness ;  equally  so  that  the  vast,  far- 
spreading,  organic  woes  of  the  world  are  forever  immedi- 
cable by  any  such  remedy. 

In  one  view,  it  may  be  rightly  said  that  the  whole  ob- 
ject of  God,  in  our  training,  is  to  develop  in  us  a  charac- 
ter of  eternal  uprightness;  developing  also,  in  that  man- 
ner, as  a  necessary  consequence,  grand  possibilities  of  so- 
cial order  and  well  being;  though,  when  we  thus  speak,  we 
include  the  fact  of  sin  and  the  engagement  with  it  of  a 
supernatural  grace,  to  lift  up  the  otherwise  remediless  fall 
of  nature.  But  this,  if  we  must  have  the  word,  is  Chris- 
tian development;  a  development  accomplished,  by  carry- 
ing us  across  and  up  out  of  the  gulf  of  unnature,  where 
the  hope  of  all  progress  and  character  was  ended.  "We 
are  developed,  in  this  sense,  by  and  through  an  experience 
of  that  state  of  wrong,  whose  woe  it  is  that  it  is  the  fall  of 
nature  and,  in  that  sense,  the  end  of  all  development. 
But  this,  it  will  be  seen,  is  not  the  popular  doctrine  of 
progress,  which  assumes  the  fact  of  a  progress  in  right 
lines,  without  any  call  for  supernatural  interference,  with- 
out any  regenerative  or  new-creative  process.  There  may 
be  hard  throes  of  suffering  experience  and  bitter  struggles 
with  individual  and  social  evils,  but  time,  it  is  supposed, 
will  teach,  and  experience  redeem,  and  so  the  great  battle 
of  natural  development  will  lead  to  final  victory.  In  this 
manner,  progress,  it  is  supposed,  will  at  last  cure  all  the 
evils  which  we  have  been  recapitulating  as  the  fruit  and  fall 
of  sin.  That  such  a  hope  is  groundless  we  will  now  under 
take  to  show. 

Consider,  first,  the  savage  state,  whence  it  is  continually 
assumed  that  history  and  civilization  spring.  The  doctrine 
is  that  all  the  advanced  nations  of  mankind  began  as  sav- 


224  THE    SAVAGE    RACES 

ages,  and  that  all  the  peoples  of  the  world  now  existing, 
are  on  their  way  up,  out  of  the  savage  state,  into  civiliza- 
tion and  a  state  of  social  virtue.  Contrary  to  this,  no  sav- 
age race  of  the  world  has  ever  been  raised  into  civilization, 
least  of  all,  into  a  state  of  virtue,  by  mere  natural  devel- 
opment. All  which  is  evident  by  just  that  which  distin- 
guishes the  savage  state;  for  it  is  the  principal  and,  in  fact, 
only  comprehensive  distinction  of  the  savage  races,  that 
they  are  such  as  have  fallen  below  progress,  living  on  from 
age  to  age  without  progress,  and  sometimes  quite  dying 
out;  for  the  simple  reason  that  there  is  no  sufficient  capac- 
ity of  progress  left,  to  perpetuate  their  life,  in  proximity 
with  more  advanced  races.  They  are  beings,  or  races 
physiologically  run  down,  or  become  effete,  under  sin; 
fallen  at  last  below  progress,  below  society,  become  a  herd 
no  longer  capable  of  public  organization,  and  a  true,  social 
life.  It  signifies  nothing  for  such  races  to  ask  more  time ; 
time  can  do  nothing  for  them  better  than  extermination. 
It  is  well,  if  even  a  gospel  and  a  faith  above  nature  can 
now  get  such  hold  of  them  as  to  raise  them.  They  are,  in 
fact,  just  as  far  off  from  the  original  unpracticed,  unde- 
veloped state  of  nature,  as  the  most  advanced  races;  and, 
as  David  said  over  the  child — "I  shall  go  to  him  but  he 
shall  not  return  to  me,"  so  it  is  possible  for  the  living  and 
advanced  races  to  go  downward,  but  never  for  these  dead 
ones,  unassisted,  to  rise.  We  have  proofs  enough  that, 
peoples  advanced  in  culture  may  become  savages,  but  no 
solitary  example  of  a  race  of  savages  that  have  risen  to  a 
civilized  state,  by  mere  development.  And  the  real  fact 
is,  that  we  may  much  better  assert  a  law  of  natural  dete- 
rioration, than  a  law  of  natural  progress;  for,  apart  from 
some  influence  or  aid  of  a  supernatural  kind,  the  deterio- 


MAKE    NO    PROGRESS.  225 

ration  of  society,  under  the  penal  mischiefs  of  sin,  would 
be  universal.  By  the  supposition  it  should  be  so;  for,  as 
all  society  is  under  sin,  it  is  of  course  suffering  the  retri- 
butive action  of  penal  causes,  and  as  all  discord  propagates 
only  greater  discord  and  can  not  propagate  harmony,  it 
follows  that  the  run  of  society  under  sin  must  be  down- 
ward, from  bad  to  worse,  unless  interrupted  by  some  re- 
medial agency  from  without. 

It  is  somewhat  difficult  to  test  our  particular  opinion  on 
this  subject  by  actual  examples;  for  we  can  not  common- 
ly trace  the  unhistoric  and  subtle  methods,  in  which  any 
race  of  men  may  have  been  impregnated  with  new  possi- 
bilities; sometimes  by  other  religions,  with  which  they 
are  made  conversant  by  commerce  and  travel;  sometimes 
by  sporadic  and  supernatural  revelations;  traces  of  which 
are  discernible,  not  only  in  the  extra-Jewish  examples 
of  Jethro,  Job,  and  Cornelius,  but  in  the  literature  of 
all  the  cultivated  races,  and  sometimes,  here  and  there,  in 
the  demonstrations  even  of  the  wild  races.  That  the  old 
Pelasgic  race  was  raised,  by  a  mere  natural  progress,  to  the 
high  pitch  of  culture  displayed  by  the  Greek  civilization, 
we  have  no  reason  whatever  to  believe.  Their  literature, 
from  Hesiod  downward,  is  sprinkled  with  too  many  traces 
of  sentiment  derived  from  the  Jewish  and  Egyptian  relig- 
ions, to  suffer  the  opinion  that  they  are  a  nation  thus  ad- 
vanced, by  the  simple  motherhood  of  nature.  The  Roman 
civilization  was,  in  fact,  a  propagation  of  the  Greek,  with 
the  advantage  of  a  right  infusion  from  her  serious  and 
venerable  fathers,  who,  like  Numa,  communed  with  invis- 
ible powers  in  retired  groves  and  silent  grottos.  The 
Teutonic  race,  often  named  as  an  example  of  natural  de- 
velopment, is  known  to  have  been  set  forward  by  the 


226  THE    SAVAGE    IS    NOT    A    FRESH, 

civilizations  it  conquered  and  its  early  conversion  to  the 
Christian  faith.  Meantime  how  many  great  and  powerful 
races  have  become  extinct.  We  look  for  the  Ninevites 
with  as  little  hope  as  for  Ninus  himself.  The  Assyrians, 
Babylonians,  and  Medes  are  also  vanished.  The  Egyp- 
tians, Phoenicians,  Etruscans,  Eomans,  once  the  great 
powers  of  history  and  civilization,  are  extinct.  The 
Aztec  race,  run  down  to  such  a  state  of  incapacity  as  not 
even  to  understand  their  own  monuments,  or  know  by 
whom  they  were  built,  we  rightly  call  savages,  and  look 
upon  as  having  just  now  come  to  their  vanishing  point. 

What  now  does  it  mean  that  so  many  races,  empires, 
languages  of  the  world,  have  become  extinct?  Is  this  a 
token  of  infallible  development  ?  Do  we  see  in  this  the 
proof  that  all  the  evil  and  sin  of  the  world  are  going,  at 
last,  to  be  surmounted  and  cleared  by  the  inevitable  law  of 
progress  ?  What  would  our  new  prophets  of  development 
say,  if  they  were  told,  when  exulting  so  confidently  in  the 
glorious  future  of  their  own  and  all  other  nations,  that  a  day 
will  certainly  be  reached,  when  the  Anglo-American  race 
is  become  an  extinct  race,  Washington  a  contested  locality, 
and  the  Constitution  of  the  United  States  a  hopeless  search 
of  the  world's  antiquarians.  Distant  as  such  an  expecta- 
tion may  be  from  our  thoughts,  and  contrary  as  it  may  be 
to  the  illimitable  progress  of  which  we  hear  so  often,  it  is 
only  that  which  has  happened  a  hundred  times  already, 
and  may  as  well  happen  again. 

We  have  spoken  of  the  evident  falsity  of  the  supposi- 
tion, that  all  the  advancement  of  the  world  begins  at  an 
originally  savage  state ;  that  being,  in  fact,  no  first,  but  an 
old  and  decayed  state  rather,  where  long  ages  of  deterio- 
ration under  sin  have  finally  extirpated  the  original  possi- 


BUT    AN    OLD    STATE.  227 

bilities  of  advancement.  The  first  stage  of  human  so- 
ciety was  simply  a  stage  of  crudity,  or  crude  capacity, 
and  was  not  more  remote  from  the  state  of  high 
civilization  than  it  was  from  the  low,  decrepid,  ani- 
malized  condition  which  we  now  designate  by  the  term 
savage.  All  races  begin  together  at  the  state  of  simple 
being,  or  crude  capacity,  and  only  make  the  fatal  leap  of 
sin  together.  After  that  they  separate,  some  ascending, 
led  up  by  their  holy  seers  and  lawgivers,  and  others,  not 
having  or  not  giving  heed  to  such,  going  down  the  scale 
of  penal  deteriorations  to  become  savages.  A  full  half 
the  globe  is  peopled  thus  by  tribes  which  are  either 
reduced  to  the  savage  condition,  or  else  are  far  on  their 
way  toward  it ;  humbled  in  capacity,  physically  deterio- 
rated, and  that,  to  such  a  degree,  that  the  springs  of  recu- 
perative force  appear  to  be  quite  gone.  Considering  now 
the  certain  fact,  that  all  these  had  their  beginning  in  a 
simply  crude  state,  having  the  same  high  possibilities  and 
affinities,  which  the  races  had  that  are  now  most  advanced, 
what  are  we  to  think  of  mere  development?  This  advant- 
age or  condition  of  crude  possibility  they  had,  many  thou- 
sands of  years  ago,  and  the  result  is  what  we  see.  Having 
run  down  thus  miserably  under  the  boasted  gospel  of 
natural  progress,  what  hope  is  there  in  this  gospel  for  the 
final  restoration  of  all  things  ? 

It  is  fatally  opposed  too  by  the  geologic  analogies. 
Here  it  stands,  the  settled  verdict  of  science  itself,  that  the 
successive  eras  of  vegetable  and  animal  life  have  not  been 
introduced,  by  any  law  of  progress,  or  by  any  mere  devel- 
opment of  nature  and  her  forces.  The  attempts  that  have 
been  made  to  show  this  are  even  pitiable  failures.  They 
ask  us,  in  fact,  to  believe  greater  miracles  in  the  name  of 


228  THE    HEALING    FUNCTION, 

development  than  any  we  encounter  in  the  gospel  history. 
Thus,  we  have  displayed  in  the  new  creations  of  the  rocks 
themselves,  a  standing  type  of  that  moral  new  crea- 
tion, by  which  the  distempered  and  fallen  races  of  the 
world  are  to  be  raised  up.  Lest  we  should  think  any 
such  divine  intervention  incredible,  and  try  to  find  some 
better  hope  for  man  in  the  gospel  of  development,  we  are 
here  familiarized  with  the  fact,  that  no  such  law  of  devel- 
opment has  been  able  to  carry  on  the  geologic  progress  of 
the  planet,  and  that  God  has  been  wont,  in  all  its  ancient 
depopulations,  to  insert  new  germs  of  life  creatively,  and 
people  it  with  living  creatures  fresh  from  his  hand. 

Again  it  is  a  consideration  scarcely  less  impressive,  that 
God  has  managed  to  insert  into  the  physiological  history 
of  animals  and  vegetables  an  always-present,  living  type 
of  the  process  itself,  by  which,  as  transcending  all  mere 
development,  his  supernatural  remedy  operates;  so  that 
we  may  see  it,  as  it  were,  with  our  eyes,  and  become  famil- 
iar with  it.  I  refer  to  that  wondrous,  inexplicable  func- 
tion of  healing,  discovered  in  the  restoration  or  repair  of 
animals  and  vegetables,  that  are  wounded  or  sick.  When 
a  tree,  for  example,  is  hacked,  or  bruised,  a  strange  nurs- 
ing process  forthwith  begins,  by  which  the  wound  is 
healed.  A  new  bark  is  formed  on  the  edges  of  the 
wound,  by  what  method  no  art  of  man  can  trace,  the 
dead  matter  is  thrown  off,  and  a  growth  inward  narrows 
the  breach,  till  finally  the  two  margins  meet  and  the  tis- 
sues interweave,  and  not  even  a  scar  is  left.  So  in  all  the 
flesh  wounds  of  animals,  and  the  fractures  even  of  bones. 
So  too  in  regard  to  all  diseases  not  terminating  mortally ; 
they  pass  a  crisis,  where  the  healing  function,  whatever  it 
be,  triumphs  over  the  poison  of  the  disease  and  a  recovery 


NO    MODE    OF    DEVELOPMENT.  229 

follows,  in  which  the  whole  flesh  and  fiber  appear  even 
to  be  produced  anew. 

Here  then  is  a  healing  power,  whose  working  we  can  no 
way  trace,  and  one  that,  if  we  look  at  the  causes  of  disin- 
tegration present,  appears  even  to  accomplish  what  is  im- 
possible. Eegarding  the  body  as  a  machine — and  taken  as 
a  merely  material  organization  what  is  it  more? — it  is 
plainly  impossible  for  it  to  heal,  in  this  manner,  and  repair 
itself.  The  disordered  watch  can  never  run  itself  into 
good  repair.  In  machines,  disorder  can  only  propagate 
and  aggravate  disorder,  till  they  become  a  wreck.  The 
physicians  and  physiologists  call  the  strange  healing  func- 
tion the  vis  medicatrix;  as  if  it  were  some  gentle,  feminine 
nurse,  hidden  from  the  sight,  whose  office  it  is  to  expel  the 
poisons,  knit  the  fractures,  and  heal  the  wounds  of  bodies. 
And  as  names  often  settle  the  profoundest  questions,  so  it 
appears  to  be  commonly  taken  for  granted  here,  that  the 
healing  accomplished  is  wrought  by  a  nursing  function 
thus  named,  as  one  of  the  inherent  properties  of  vital  sub- 
stances. It  may  be  so  or  it  may  not;  for  the  whole  ques- 
tion is  one  that  is  involved  in  the  profoundest  mystery. 
The  healing  property  may  be  one  of  the  incidents  of  life 
itself,  or  it  may  be  a  distinct  power  whose  office  it  is  to  be 
the  guard  and  medicating  nurse  of  life,  or  it  may  be  the 
working  of  a  grand  supernatural  economy  set  in  closest 
vicinage  to  nature,  to  be  the  physical,  visible,  always-pres- 
ent token  of  a  like  supernatural  economy  in  the  matters 
of  character  and  the  soul.  But  whatever  view  we  take  of 
this  healing  power  in  physiology,  or  whatever  account  we 
make  of  it,  these  two  points  are  clear. 

First  that  the  healing  accomplished  is  no  fact  of  devel- 
opment. There  is  no  difficulty  in  seeing  how  existing 

20 


230  THE    HEALING    FUNCTION 

tissues  and  organs  may  create  extensions  within  their  own 
vascular  sphere,  and  this  is  development.  But  where  a  new 
skin  or  bark  is  to  be  created,  or  a  new  interlocking  made  of 
parts  that  are  sundered,  the  ducts  and  vesicles  that  might  act 
in  development,  being  parted  and  open  at  their  ends,  want 
mending  themselves.  Thus,  when  the  parts  of  a  fractured 
bone  are  knit  together,  and  we  see  them  reaching  after  each 
other,  as  it  were,  across  a  chasm,  where  there  are  no  vessels 
to  bridge  it  or  carry  across  the  lines  of  connection,  devel- 
opment might  well  enough  make  the  parts  longer,  but  how 
could  it  make  them  unite  across  the  fracture,  by  which  they 
are  separated?  The  development  of  a  tree,  wounded  by 
some  violence,  would  only  enlarge  the  wound,  just  in  pro- 
portion to  the  enlargement  of  the  surface  which  the  bark 
should  cover.  A  fevered  body  does  not  cure  itself  by  de- 
velopment. As  little  can  we  imagine  that  the  restored 
health  and  volume  of  the  body  is  created  by  the  develop- 
ment of  the  fever.  No  shade  of  countenance  therefore  is 
given  to  the  hope  that  human  development,  under  the  re- 
tributive woes  of  sin,  will  be  any  sufficient  cure  of  its  dis- 
orders, or  will  set  the  fallen  subjects  of  it  forward,  in  a 
course  of  social  progress. 

This  also,  secondly,  is  equally  clear,  that,  as  the  myste- 
rious healing  of  bodies  yields  the  development  theory  no 
token  of  favor,  it  is  only  a  more  impressive  type,  on  that 
account,  of  some  grand  restorative  economy,  by  which  the 
condition  of  unnature  in  souls  and  the  world,  is  to  be  su- 
pernaturally  regenerated — just  such  a  type  as,  regarding 
the  relations  of  matter  to  mind,  and  of  things  natural  to 
things  spiritual,  we  might  expect  to  find  incorporated,  in 
some  large  and  systematic  way,  in  the  visible  objects  and 
processes  of  the  world.  And  how  much  does  the  healing 


NOT    DEVELOPMENT.  231 

of  bodies  signify,  when  associated  thus  with  the  grand 
elemental  disorder  and  breakage  of  sin!  What  is  it,  in 
fact,  but  a  kind  of  glorious,  every  where  visible  sacrament, 
that  tokens  life,  and  hope,  and  healing  invisible,  for  all  the 
retributive  woes  and  bleeding  lacerations  of  our  guilty,  fall- 
en state,  as  a  race  apostate  from  God. 

Hence  too  probably  the  fact  that  transactions  of  healing 
are  so  closely  connected,  the  world  over,  with  sentiments 
of  religion.  Perhaps  the  fact  is  due,  in  part,  to  some  la- 
tent association  that  connects  diseases  with  sin  and,  to 
much  the  same  extent,  connects  the  hope  of  healing  with 
some  possibility  of  a  divine  medication.  However  this 
may  be,  the  mystery  of  healing,  as  we  are  constituted, 
stands  in  close  affinity  with  God  and  the  faith  of  his  su- 
pernatural operation.  Thus  it  was  that  the  priests  both  of 
the  Egyptians  and  the  Greeks  were  their  physicians,  and 
that  their  precepts  and  prescripts  of  healing  were  kept  in 
their  temples.  Esculapius  too,  the  god  of  medicine,  had 
his  own  altars  and  priests.  At  a  latter  period,  the  Essenes 
and  the  Christian  monks,  accounted  by  some  to  be  their 
successors,  had  their  pious  explorations  of  diseases  and 
the  sacred  powers  of  remedies ;  reducing  medicine  itself  to 
a  function  of  religion.  Later  still,  Paracelsus  himself  be- 
gan the  restoration  of  medicine,  as  a  kind  of  chemical  the- 
osophy.  And  as  Christianity  itself  classes  healings  among 
the  spiritual  gifts,  and  calls  the  elders  of  the  church  to 
pray  for  the  sick;  so  we  find  that  some  of  our  Indian 
tribes  have  traditions  of  one  whom,  as  related  to  the  Great 
Spirit,  they  call  the  Uncle,  and  who  came  into  the  world 
by  a  mysterious  advent,  long  ages  ago,  and  instituted  the 
"Grand  Medicine,"  which  is,  in  fact,  their  religion. 

It  is  difficult  to  resist  the  impression,  in  such  demon- 


232  WE    HAVE    NO    FAITH 

strations  as  these,  of  some  very  profound  connection  be- 
tween the  healing  of  bodies  and  the  faith  of  a  supernat- 
ural grace  of  healing  for  the  disorders  of  souls.  Else  why 
this  persistent  tendency  in  men's  opinions  of  healing,  to 
associate  the  fevered  body  and  the  leprous  mind,  and  seek 
the  medication  of  both,  in  the  common  rites  of  religion. 

But  there  is  a  shorter  argument  with  the  scheme  that 
proposes  to  find  a  remedy  for  all  the  ills  of  character  and 
society,  in  what  it  calls  a  more  complete  development.  It 
is  this :  that  no  one  ever  dares  practically  to  act  on  the  faith 
of  such  a  doctrine,  whether  in  the  state  or  the  family.  The 
civil  law  is,  in  fact,  and  to  a  very  great  extent,  a  restraint 
on  development,  and  has  its  merit  in  the  fact  that  it  is. 
It  forbids  men  to  unfold  themselves  freely,  in  their  base 
passions  and  criminal  instigations,  and  deters  them  from 
it.  Were  it  not  for  the  state,  protecting  itself  by  such 
means  against  development,  society  would  be  quite  dis- 
solved. What  we  discover  in  families  is  even  more  re- 
markable. There  are  multitudes  of  parents  that  believe, 
as  they  suppose,  with  all  their  hearts,  in  the  good  day 
coming  through  the  progress  of  human  development. 
And  as  part  of  the  same  general  faith,  their  views  of  edu- 
cation make  it  to  consist  simply  in  educing  or  developing 
just  what  is  in  the  child's  nature.  But  they  do  not  act  on 
that  principle  in  the  house,  and  dare  not;  though  probably 
enough  they  are  never  aware  of  the  fact.  They  maintain 
a  family  regimen  that  consists,  to  a  great  degree,  not  in 
development  but  in  repression.  To  let  the  child  have  his 
way  and  act  himself  out  freely,  without  restraint,  is  no 
part  of  their  plan.  Probably  it  never  occurs  to  them  as  a 
rational  possibility.  Just  contrary  to  this,  they  lay  their 
foundations  in  a  restriction  of  natural  development;  hoping 


IN    DEVELOPMENT.  233 

in  that  manner  to  extirpate  unruly  and  base  instigations, 
and  form  a  habit  in  the  child  of  doing  better  things  than 
he  would  most  naturally  do.  And  it  is  remarkable  that, 
in  the  fulfilling  of  their  office,  which  is  so  far  an  office  of 
repression,  they  are  acting  as  a  force  supernatural.  Ac- 
cording to  our  definition,  it  will  be  remembered  that  hu- 
man wills  are  strictly  supernatural  in  their  action,  and  the 
child,  we  here  discover,  spends  all  the  first  years  of  his 
life  under  the  regulative  and  repressive  action  of  such 
wills.  He  is  in  them,  in  fact,  more  truly  than  he  is  in  na- 
ture, and  the  house  is  a  little  creation  made  for  him  by 
their  keeping.  He  is  handled  in  infancy  as  they  direct,  fed 
as  they  direct  when  he  begins  to  ask  for  food,  clothed  as  they 
direct,  commanded,  limited,  forbidden,  repressed,  and  so  is 
finally  grown  up  to  an  age  of  self-regulation.  The  pro- 
cess may  be  called  his  development,  but  the  most  remark- 
able thing  in  it  is  that  it  is  a  restraint  of  development. 
Why  this  restraint?  If  development  is  going  to  be  the  gos- 
pel of  the  world's  redemption,  what  makes  it  wise,  in  the 
common  sense  of  the  world,  to  restrain  that  gospel  ?  Are 
the  ills  of  society  and  the  world  going  to  be  cured  too 
soon?  If  development  can  do  all  that  is  promised,  why 
not  give  it  a  hearty  godspeed  every  where,  arid  let  every 
human  creature,  old  and  young,  act  out  what  is  in  him,  in 
the  speediest,  most  unrestricted  manner  possible  ?  A  glance 
in  this  direction  is  sufficient  to  show  us  that  all  we  hear  of 
inevitable  progress,  and  the  necessary  laws  of  develop- 
ment, is  hollow  and  deceitful.  It  is  not  development  but 
new  creation  that  can  bring  us  the  remedies  we  look  for. 
Nature  has  powers  and  capabilities  that  want  development. 
Eeduced  to  real  unnature  (which  is  her  present  state,)  she 
also  has  disordered  passions,  base  instigations,  greedy  ap- 

20* 


234  SELF-REFOBMATION, 

petites,  ferocious  animosities,  propensities  to  cunning  and 
falsehood,  which  want  no  development,  and  which,  if  they 
are  developed,  unrestrained,  annihilate  all  chance  of  pro- 
gress, and  even  forbid  the  existence  of  society.  Mere  de- 
velopment therefore  promises  nothing. 

We  come  now — 

II.  To  the  other  rival  gospel,  that  which  proposes  to 
dispense  with  all  supernatural  aids,  and  to  restore  the  dis- 
orders and  the  fallen  character  of  sin,  by  a  self-cultivated, 
or  self-originated  virtue. 

Expectation  is  here  rested  on  the  human  will,  which,  in 
our  view,  may  be  done,  it  will  be  said,  with  greater  rea- 
son, since  we  make  it,  even  by  definition,  a  supernatural 
power.  But  there  are  different  orders  or  degrees,  it  must 
be  observed,  of  supernatural  power;  the  human,  the  an- 
gelic, the  divine;  which  all  are  alike  in  the  fact  that  the 
will  acts  from  itself,  uncaused  in  its  action,  but  very  un- 
like as  regards  potency,  or  the  extent  of  their  efficacy. 
What  we  are  endeavoring,  in  our  argument,  to  show,  is 
the  fact  of  a  divine  supernatural  agency  concerned  in  the 
upraising  or  redemption  of  man.  But  if  man  can  raise 
himself,  by  his  own  will,  that  is,  by  his  humanly  super- 
natural force,  then  plainly  there  is  no  need  of  a  divine  in- 
tervention from  without  and  above  nature,  to  regenerate 
his  fallen  state.  Still  it  will  not  be  denied  by  the  class  of 
teachers  most  forward  in  maintaining  this  form  of  natu- 
ralism, that  all  religious  virtue  is  dependent,  in  a  certain 
sense,  on  the  concourse  and  spiritual  helping  of  God; 
Only  that  concourse  and  helping,  it  will  be  said,  belongs 
to  the  scheme  of  nature,  and  never  undertakes  to  help  us 
out  of  the  retributive  woes  and  disorders  of  nature;  for 
nature  is  the  system  of  God,  including  all  he  does  or  can 


NO    SUFFICIENT    HOPE.  235 

rationally  be  expected  to  do.  To  imagine  that  such  a 
mode  of  piety,  or  religious  virtue,  should  be  maintained 
by  the  human  will,  would  be  less  extravagant  if  there  were 
no  sin,  no  consequent  woes  and  disorders;  though  even 
then  it  would  be  the  faith  of  a  God  imprisoned,  or  en- 
tombed, in  the  inexorable  laws  of  nature ;  with  whom  the 
soul  could  aspire  to  no  real  converse  and  could  have  no 
social  sympathy,  more  than  with  a  wall.  Before  this  un- 
bending prisoner  of  fate,  this  nature-God,  this  dead  wall, 
he  might  go  on  to  dress  up  a  character  and  fashion  a  mere- 
ly ethical  virtue;  cultivating  truth,  honesty,  justice,  tem- 
perance, kindness,  piling  up  acts  of  merit,  and  doing  legal 
works  of  charity ;  but  to  call  this  character  religious,  how- 
ever plausible  the  show  it  makes,  is  only  an  abuse  of  the 
term.  Religious  character  is  not  legal.  It  is  an  inspira- 
tion— the  Life  of  God  in  the  Soul  of  Man ;  and  no  such 
life  can  ever  quicken  a  soul  except  in  the  faith  of  a  Living 
God,  which  here  is  manifestly  wanting.  Not  even  the 
pure  angels  could  subsist  in  such  a  style  of  virtue ;  for  it 
is  the  strength  and  beatitude  of  their  holiness,  that  it  is  no 
will- work  in  them,  but  an  eternal,  immediate  inspiration 
of  God.  Consciously  it  is  not  theirs,  but  the  inbreathing 
life  of  their  Father. 

But  this  ethical  gospel,  this  religion  acted  as  in  panto- 
mime, becomes  even  more  insipid  and  absurd,  when  the 
fact  of  sin,  with  all  its  consequences  of  distemper  and  dis- 
order, is  admitted.  Now  the  problem  is  to  find  by  what 
power  the  original  harmony  of  nature  can  be  reconstructed, 
and  its  currents  of  penal  disaster  turned  back.  Can  the 
human  will  do  this?  That  it  can  act  upon  the  courses 
of  nature  we  know, — sin  itself  indeed  is  the  staring  and 
incontrovertible  proof  that  it  can.  But  it  does  not  follow, 


236  SELF-RESTORATION 

as  we  have  said  already,  that  the  power  which  has  broken 
an  egg,  or  shivered  a  crystal,  can  mend  it.  That  is  a  thing 
more  difficult,  and  demands  a  higher  power. 

Consider  simply  the  change  that  is  needed  to  restore 
the  lapsed  integrity  of  a  soul.  Its  original  spontaneity  to 
good  is  gone,  its  silver  cord  of  harmony  is  broken,  the 
sweet  order  of  life  is  turned  into  a  tumult  of  inward  bit- 
terness, its  very  laws  are  become  its  tormentors.  All  its 
curious,  multiform,  scarcely  conceivable  functions,  submit- 
ted by  its  laws  to  the  will,  are  now  contesting  always 
with  each  other  and  are  wholly  intractable  to  its  sover- 
eignty. And  still  it  is  expected  of  the  will,  that  it  is 
going  to  gather  them  all  up  into  the  primal  order,  and 
reconstruct  their  shattered  unity !  Why,  it  were  easier,  a 
thousand  fold,  for  man's  will  to  gather  all  the  birds  of  the 
jgky  into  martial  order,  and  march  them  as  a  squadron 
through  the  tempests  of  the  air!  Manifestly  none  but 
God  can  restore  the  lapsed  order  of  the  soul.  He  alone 
can  reconstruct  the  crystalline  unity.  "Which,  if  He  does, 
it  will  imply  an  acting  on  those  lines  of  causes  in  its  nature, 
by  whose  penal  efficacy  it  is  distempered;  and  that  is,  by 
the  supposition,  a  supernatural  operation. 

Besides,  the  work  is  really  not  done,  till  the  subject  is 
restored  to  a  virtue  whose  essence  is  liberty.  And  how 
is  man,  by  his  mere  will,  to  start  the  flow  of  liberty  ?  He 
may  do  this  and  do  that,  and  keep  doing  this  and  that, 
carefully,  punctiliously,  suffering  no  slackness.  But  it 
will  be  work,  work  only,  and  the  play  of  liberty  will 
never  come.  He  can  never  reach  the  true  liberty  till  an 
inspiration  takes  him,  and  the  new  birth  of  God's  Spirit 
makes  him  a  son.  The  light  he  manufactures  will  be 
darkness,  or  at  best  a  pale  phosphorescence,  till  Christ  is 


IS    IMPOSSIBLE.  237 

revealed  within.  His  self-culture  may  fashion  a  picture 
with  many  marks  of  grace,  but  the  quickening  of  God 
alone  can  make  it  live.  If  he  relish  his  work  in  a  degree, 
it  will  be  the  relish  of  conceit,  not  the  living  fountain  of  a 
heavenly  joy,  bursting  up  from  unseen  depths  within.  He 
will  advance  fitfully,  eccentrically,  and  without  balance, 
making  a  grimace  here,  while  he  fashions  a  beauty  there ; 
for  there  is  no  balance  of  order  and  proportion  till  his 
faith  is  rested  in  God,  and  his  life  flows  out  from  the 
divine  plenitude  and  perfection.  Meantime  his  ideals  will 
grow  faster  than  his  attainments,  and  if  he  is  not  wholly 
drunk  up  in  conceit,  he  will  be  only  the  more  afflicted 
and  baffled,  the  greater  his  pertinacity.  0,  if  there  be 
any  kind  of  life  most  sad,  and  deepest  in  the  scale  of  pity, 
it  is  the  dry,  cold  impotence  of  one,  who  is  honestly  set  to 
the  work  of  his  own  self-redemption! 

Do  we  then  affirm,  it  will  be  asked,  the  absolute  inabil- 
ity of  a  man  to  do  and  become  what  is  right  before  God? 
That  is  the  Christian  doctrine,  and  there  is  none  that  is 
more  obviously  true.  Wherein,  then,  it  may  also  be 
asked,  is  there  any  ground  of  blame  for  continuance  in 
sin  ?  Because,  we  answer,  there  is  a  Living  God  engaged 
to  help  us,  and  inviting  always  our  acceptance  of  his  help. 
Nor  is  this  any  mere  gracious  ability,  such  as  constitutes 
the  joy  of  some  and  the  offense  of  others.  No  created 
being,  of  any  world,  not  even  the  new-formed  man  be- 
fore his  fall,  nor  the  glorified  saint,  nor  the  spotless  angel, 
had  ever  any  possibility  of  holiness,  except  in  the  embrace 
of  God.  This  is  the  normal  condition  of  all  souls,  that 
they  be  filled  with  God,  acted  by  God,  holding  their  will 
m  his,  irradiated  always  by  his  all-supporting  life.  Just 
this  it  is  that  constitutes  the  radical  idea  of  religion,  and 


238  SELF-RESTORATION" 

differs  it  from  a  mere  ethical  virtue.  God  is  the  prime 
necessity  of  all  religious  virtue,  and  is  only  more  em- 
phatically so  to  beings  under  sin.  The  necessity  is  con- 
stituent, not  penal ;  it  becomes  penal  only  when  communi- 
cations originally  given  to  the  fallen,  but  now  cast  away 
by  their  sin,  require  to  be  restored. 

There  is  really  no  difficulty  in  this  question  of  disability 
under  sin,  save  that  which  is  created  by  the  fogs  of  unin- 
telligent speculation.  It  is  taken  extensively,  as  if  it 
were  a  question  regarding  man's  inherent,  independent 
ability,  when  in  fact  he  has  no  such  ability  to  any  thing. 
Can  he  obey  God,  or  not  ?  is  he  able  to  do  God's  will,  or 
not  ?  is  the  question  raised ;  and  it  is  understood  and  dis- 
cussed as  being  a  question  that  turns,  on  the  absolute 
quantities  of  the  man,  and  not  in  any  respect  on  relative 
aids  and  conditions  without;  much  as  if  the  question  were 
whether  he  has  weight,  apart  from  all  relative  weights  or 
attractions  ?  or  whether  he  can  stand  alone,  apart  from  any 
thing  to  stand  upon  ?  or  whether  he  has  power  to  live  a 
year,  apart  from  all  food  and  light  and  shelter  and  air  ? 
The  true  question  of  ability  is  different.  It  is  this: 
whether  the  subject  is  able  to  rise  into  a  holy  life,  taken 
as  insphered  in  God,  and  all  the  attractive,  transforming, 
and  supporting  influences  of  the  grace  of  God?  Apart 
from  this,  he  certainly  is  not  able.  By  mere  working  on 
himself  and  manipulating,  as  it  were,  his  body  of  sin  and 
death,  he  can  do  just  nothing  in  the  way  of  self-perfec- 
tion ;  and,  if  he  could  even  do  every  thing,  as  regards 
self-transformation,  there  would  be  no  religious  character 
in  the  result,  any  more  than  if  his  works  were  done  before 
the  moon.  Religious  character  is  God  in  the  soul,  and 
without  that  all  pretenses  of  religious  virtue  are,  in  fact. 


IS    IMPOSSIBLE.  239 

atheistic.  Such  is  the  disability  of  a  fallen  man,  taken  as 
acting  on  himself;  and  the  condition  of  an  angel,  acting 
in  that  manner,  is  no  better ;  for  he  could  not  begin  to  act 
thus,  without  being  himself  fallen,  at  the  instant.  But  if 
the  question  be  what  a  man  has  power  to  do,  taken  in  the 
surroundings  of  divine  truth  and  mercy,  which  in  fact 
include  the  co-operating  grace  of  the  divine  Spirit,  the 
true  answer  is  that  he  can  do  all  things.  He  has,  at  every 
moment,  a  complete  power  as  respects  doing  what  God 
requires  of  him  at  that  moment,  and  is  responsible  accord- 
ing to  his  power.  And  yet,  when  we  say  a  complete 
power,  we  mean,  not  so  much  that  he  is  going  even  then 
to  do  something  himself,  as  that  he  is  going  to  have  some- 
thing done  within,  by  the  quickening  and  transforming 
power  of  his  divine  Lord,  in  whom  he  trusts.  His  power 
is  to  set  himself  before  power,  open  his  nature  to  the  rule 
of  power,  and  so  to  live.  Even  as  we  may  say  that  a 
tree  has  power  to  live  and  grow,  not  by  acting  on  itself 
and  willing  to  grow,  but  as  it  is  ministered  unto  by  its 
natural  surroundings,  the  soil,  the  sun,  the  dew,  the  air. 
It  has  only  to  offer  itself  openly  and  receptively  to  these, 
and  by  their  force  to  grow. 

Where,  then,  it  may  be  asked,  is  the  significance  of 
free  will,  which  we  have  even  shown  to  be  a  power  su- 
pernatural? If  the  disordered  soul  can  not  restore  itself, 
or  by  diligent  self-culture  regain  the  loss  it  has  made  by 
sin,  wherein  lies  the  advantage  of  such  a  power,  and 
where  the  responsibility  to  a  life  of  holy  virtue?  Our 
answer  is,  that  by  the  freedom  of  the  will  we  understand 
simply  its  freedom  as  a  volitional  function;  but  mere 
volitions,  taken  by  themselves,  involve  no  capacity  to 
regenerate,  or  constitute,  a  character.  Holy  virtue  is  not 


240  EESTOKATION    POSSIBLE, 

an  act,  or  compilation  of  acts  taken  merely  as  volitions, 
but  it  is  a  new  state  or  status  rather,  a  right  disposedness, 
whence  new  action  may  flow.  And  no  mere  volitional 
exercise  can  change  the  state  or  disposedness  of  the  soul, 
without  concurrent  help  and  grace.  We  can  will  any 
thing,  but  the  execution  may  not  follow.  To  will  may 
be  present,  but  how  to  perform,  it  may  be  difficult  to  find, 
— difficult,  that  is,  when  simply  acting  in  and  upon  our- 
selves; never  difficult,  never  possible  to  fail  in  doing, 
when  acting  before  and  toward  a  Divine  Helper,  trustfully 
appealed  to.  And  this  is  the  power  of  the  will,  as  regards 
our  moral  recovery.  It  may  so  offer  itself  and  the  sub- 
ordinate capacities  to  God,  that  God  shall  have  the  whole 
man  open  to  his  dominion,  and  be  able  to  ingenerate  in 
him  a  new,  divine  state,  or  principle  of  action;  while, 
taken  as  a  governing,  cultivating,  and  perfecting  power  in 
itself,  it  has  no  such  capacity  whatsoever.  And  this  is 
the  only  rational  and  true  verdict.  Say  what  we  may  of 
the  will  as  a  strictly  self-determining  power,  raise  what 
distinctions  we  may  as  regards  the  kinds  of  ability,  such 
as  natural  and  moral,  antecedent  and  subsequent,  we  have 
no  ability  at  all,  of  any  kind,  to  regenerate  our  own  state, 
or  restore  our  own  disorders.  Salvation  is  by  faith,  or 
there  is  none. 

There  is  then,  we  conclude,  no  hope  of  a  restoration  of 
society,  or  of  a  religious  upraising  of  man,  except  in  a  super- 
natural and  divine  operation.  Progress  under  sin,  by  laws 
of  natural  development,  is  a  fiction — there  is  no  hope  of 
progress,  apart  from  the  regenerative  and  quickening 
power  of  a  grace  that  transcends  mere  natural  condi- 
tions and  causes.  As  little  room  is  there  to  expect  that 


ONLY    BY    THE    GEACE    OF    GOD.  241 

men  will  be  able  to  heal  their  own  spiritual  maladies  and 
cultivate  themselves  into  heaven's  order,  by  a  merely  eth- 
ical regimen  maintained  in  the  plane  of  nature.  The  only 
remedy  for  the  human  state,  under  sin,  is  that  which  comes 
into  nature,  as  the  revelation  of  a  divine  force. 

Suppose  now  there  might  be  found  some  great  and  pro- 
found thinker,  who  has  never  come  under  the  impress  of 
Christianity,  or  even  heard  of  such  a  thing  as  a  plan  of 
supernatural  redemption ;  a  man  of  the  highest  culture, 
least  under  the  power  of  superstition;  a  free-thinker  as 
regards  the  religion  of  his  country  and  times;  and  sup- 
pose that  he,  by  the  mere  force  of  his  own  thought, 
struggling  with  the  great  problem  of  humanity,  society, 
and  progress,  should  be  found  to  rest  his  hope  deliberately 
on  some  supernatural  remedy,  as  the  only  sufficient  rem- 
edy for  the  world;  giving  forth  a  testimony  that  has  been 
audited  and  accepted  by  the  greatest  and  best  minds  of 
all  subsequent  ages;  revealing,  as  it  were,  a  Christianity 
before  the  time,  as  far  as  the  want  of  it  and  the  fact  of 
some  such  operative  power  are  concerned ;  how  unlikely 
will  it  be  that  some  new  science  of  development,  or  some 
more  rational  gospel  of  self-culture,  has  just  now  dis- 
covered the  essential  weakness  or  childishness  of  a  super- 
natural faith.  Precisely  such  a  witness  we  have  in  the 
great  Plato,  seconded  by  the  coincident  testimony  of 
many  others,  only  less  conspicuous  than  he. 

Beginning  at  the  base  note  of  human  depravity,  he 
says,  "  I  have  heard  from  the  wise  men  that  we  are  now 
dead,  and  that  the  body  is  our  sepulcher."*  Again  he 
says,  "The  prime  evil  is  inborn  in  souls;"  "it  is  implanted 
in  men  to  sin."f  Again,  "The  nature  of  mankind 

*  Gorgias,  fol.  493.        {Leg.,  p.  731. 
21 


242  THE    SAME    IS    HELD, 

is  greatly  degenerated  and  depraved,  all  manner  of  dis- 
orders infest  human  nature,  and  men,  being  impotent,  are 
torn  in  pieces  by  their  lusts,  as  by  so  many  wild  horses."* 
He  also  speaks  of  an  "evil  nature,"  "an  evil  in  nature," 
"a  disease  in  nature,"  "a  destruction  of  harmony  in  the 
soul,"  and  much  more  to  the  same  effect.  Then  again, 
tracing  the  origin  of  this  diseased  state,  he  says,  "  That 
in  times  past,  the  divine  nature  flourished  in  men ;  but,  at 
length,  being  mixed  with  mortal  custom,  it  fell  into  ruin ; 
hence  an  inundation  of  evils  in  the  race."f  Again,  "  The 
cause  of  corruption  is  from  our  parents,  so  that  we  never 
relinquish  their  evil  way,  or  escape  the  blemish  of  their 
evil  habit.":}: 

Inquiring  now  for  the  remedy  which  is  able  to  restore 
and  re-establish  the  virtue  lost,  he  discusses  at  large 
the  question,  whether  virtue  can  be  taught,  and  delibe- 
rately concludes  that  it  can  be  produced  by  no  mere  teach- 
ing. He  says,  "If,  in  this  whole  disputation,  we  have 
rightly  conceived  the  case,  virtue  is  acquired,  neither  by 
nature's  force,  nor  by  any  institutes  of  discipline  or 
teaching,  but  it  comes  to  those  that  have  it,  by  a  certain 
divine  appointment  [or  inspiration,]  over  and  above  the 
mind's  own  force  or  exertion."§  He  also  adds  that,  if  we 
could  be  dressed  up  into  a  show  of  virtue  by  teaching,  it 
would  be  the  same  as  "to  be  adorned  with  a  shadow, 
whereas  virtue  is  a  thing  real  and  solid," — rooted,  that  is, 
in  the  heart's  inmost  life.  The  same  conviction  is  ex- 
pressed in  a  different  form  when  he  says,  "That  after 
the  golden  age,  the  universe,  by  reason  of  that  confusion 
that  came  upon  it,  would  have  been  quite  dissolved,  had 
not  God  again  taken  it  upon  him  to  sit  at  the  helm  and 

*Politicus,  p.  274.       f  Critiaa,  p.  400.       JTimseus,  103.       §Meno.,  89. 


EVEN    BY    THE    WISEST    HEATHENS.          243 

govern  the  world,  and  restore  its  disordered  and  almost 
disjointed  parts  to  their  primeval  order."*  And  accord- 
antly with  such  a  conviction,  he  recommends  a  faith  in 
divine  help  and  supernatural  guidance,  and  says,  "he 
who  prayeth  to  God,  and  trusteth  in  his  good  favor,  shall 
do  well."f  Again,  "  God  is  the  beginning  and  end  of  all 
being,  and  whoever  follows  his  guidance  shall  be  happy.  "^ 
And  that  he  means,  by  this,  to  commend  a  faith  in  super- 
natural aid,  is  evident  when  he  says,  in  his  Timseus,  "that 
beatitude,  or  spiritual  liberty,  is  only  to  have  the  demon," 
that  is,  the  good  spirit,  "  dwelling  in  us,"  alluding  probably 
to  the  remarkable  declaration  of  his  teacher,  Socrates, 
"  that  a  certain  demon,  or  good  spirit,  had  followed  him 
even  from  his  childhood,  with  his  good  suggestion  or 
influence,  signifying  what  he  should  do."§  He  brings  in 
Socrates  also  maintaining  this  remarkable  dialogue  with 
his  pupil,  Alcibiades :  "  Dost  thou  know  by  what  means 
thou  mayest  avoid  the  inordinate  motions  of  thy  mind  ?" 
He  answers,  "Yes."  Soc.  "How?"  Al  "If  thou  wilt, 
Socrates."  /Soc.  "Thou  speakest  not  rightly."  Al.  "How 
then  must  I  speak  ?"  Soc.  "  Say,  if  God  will,"||  &c. 

Here  then,  we  have  a  man  rising  up  out  of  heathenism, 
one  of  the  greatest  of  mankind,  testifying  his  conviction 
of  the  disability  and  ruin  of  human  nature,  and  his  confi- 
dence in  some  supernatural  aid,  as  the  only  hope  of  the 
world — all  this  instructed  by  his  own  consciousness,  and  by 
so  many  years  of  philosophic  study,  in  the  great  problem 
of  humanity  and  human  progress.  For  no  teacher,  ever 
of  our  modern  time,  is  more  intent  on  the  possibility  of 
some  better  ideal  state  of  the  world  and  society  than  he. 

*  Politicals,  251.         f  Epinom.,  980.        J  Leg.,  715. 
§  Theages,  128.          J  Alcib.,  135.  . 


244  THEY    ABE    OPPRESSED 

In  this  problem,  indeed,  it  may  even  be  said  that  he  wore 
out  his  life. 

Seneca  speaks  quite  despairingly  of  our  possible  recov- 
ery by  any  means.  He  says,  "Our  corrupt  nature  has  drunk 
in  such  deep  draughts  of  iniquity,  which  are  so  far  incor- 
porated in  its  very  bowels,  that  you  can  not  remove  it, 
save  by  tearing  them  out."  And  yet  he  conceives,  in 
the  faintest  manner,  some  possibility  of  supernatural  aid. 
"No  man  is  able  to  clear  himself,  let  some  one  give  him  a 
hand,  let  some  one  lead  him  out"*  —  as  if  asking  for  some 
Christ  unknown,  to  come  and  bring  the  soul  forth  from  its 
thralldom. 

He  also  says,  as  if  he  were  writing  out  another  Tilth 
chapter  of  the  Komans,  "What  is  it,  Lucilius,  that,  when 
we  set  ourselves  in  one  way,  draws  us  another,  and  when 
we  desire  to  avoid  any  course,  drives  us  into  it?  What  is 
it  that  so  wrestles  with  our  mind,  allowing  us  never  to  set- 
tle any  good  resolution  once  for  all?"f 

And  Ovid  also  joins  in  the  same  confession  —  "  If  I  could, 
I  would  be  more  sane.  But  some  unknown  force  drags  me 
against  my  will.  Desire  draws  me  one  way,  conviction  an- 
other. I  see  the  better  and  approve,  the  worse  I  follow.":}: 
"0  wretched  man  that  I  am,  who  shall  deliver?"  is  the 
sigh  that  interprets  and  fitly  concludes  their  confession. 

Passages  in  great  number  could  be  cited  from  other  an- 
cient writers,  in  which  they  express  the  same  conviction  , 
that  man  can  never  be  raised  out  of  his  sin,  by  any  mere 
natural  force.  But  these  are  points  of  opinion.  '  We  pre- 
fer to  add,  as  being  more  significant,  some  illustrations 
also  of  the  practical  longing  they  had  for  the  appearance 
of  some  divine  helper,  and  the  manifestation  of  God  in 


*Ep.,  52.         fEp.,  52.        tMetam,viL:18. 


BY  THE  UNCERTAINTIES  OF  TRUTH.   245 

some  gracious  revelation  of  his  presence.  In  illus- 
trations of  this  kind,  we  shall  see  exactly  what  would  be 
our  own  condition,  if  these  supernatural  manifestations, 
denied  by  so  many  in  our  times,  were  taken  away,  and  we 
were  really  set  back,  as  we  require  ourselves  to  be,  in  the 
proper  darkness  of  nature.  It  was  a  continual  source  of 
misery  to  the  most  enlightened  of  the  pagan  scholars  and 
philosophers  that,  whatever  they  seemed  to  discover,  or  to 
establish  by  the  light  of  natural  reason,  was  yet  never  dis- 
covered, never  established,  but  was  still  overhung  by  a 
cloud  of  uncertainty.  Thus  we  hear  Xenophanes  closing 
off  his  work  on  Nature,  in  these  words — "No  man  has 
discovered  any  certainty,  nor  will  discover  it,  concerning 
the  gods,  and  what  I  say  of  the  universe.  For  if  he  ut- 
tered what  is  even  most  perfect,  still  he  does  not  know  it, 
but  conjecture  hangs  over  all." 

Oppressed  by  this  feeling  of  uncertainty,  they  were  only 
goaded  the  more  painfully  in  their  search  after  the  real 
meaning  of  life,  and  waited,  with  a  longing  only  the  more 
hungry,  for  some  revelation  of  divine  things,  if  haply  it 
might  sometime  be  given.  Thus  Plato,  speaking  in  his 
Phsedo  of  the  soul,  and  its  destiny,  says — "It  appears  to  me 
that,  to  know  them  clearly  in  the  present  life,  is  either  im- 
possible, or  very  difficult;  on  the  other  hand,  not  to  test 
what  has  been  said  of  them  in  every  possible  way,  not  to 
investigate  the  whole  matter,  and  exhaust  upon  it  every 
effort,  is  the  part  of  a  very  weak  man.  For  we  ought,  in 
respect  to  these  things,  either  to  learn  from  others  how 
they  stand,  or  to  discover  them  for  ourselves ;  or,  if  both 
these  are  impossible,  then,  taking  the  best  of  human  rea- 
sonings, that  which  appears  the  best  supported,  and  em- 
barking on  that,  as  one  who  risks  himself  on  a  raft,  so  to 

21* 


246  AND    TESTIFY    THEIR    LONGING 

sail  through  life — unless  one  could  be  carried  more  safely, 
or  with  less  risk,  on  a  secret  conveyance,  or  some  Divine 
Logos."  What  a  condition  of  hunger  for  knowledge ! — a 
great  and  mighty  soul,  prying  at  the  gates  of  light,  to  force 
them  open,  catching  the  faintest  gleams  of  truth  or  opin- 
ion, and  committing  his  all  tenderly  to  them  as  to  a  slen- 
der raft  upon  the  sea,  only  venting,  with  a  sigh,  the  mys- 
terious hint  of  a  Divine  Logos,  who  will  possibly  come  to 
him  within,  and  be  a  surer  light,  a  safer  guide.  And  this 
dim  hint  of  a  better  revelation  is  ventured  more  boldly  in 
his  Alcibiades,  when  he  says — "We  must  wait  patiently 
until  some  one,  either  a  god  or  some  inspired  man,  teach 
us  our  moral  and  religious  duties  and,  as  Pallas  in  Homer 
did  to  Diomede,  remove  the  darkness  from  our  eyes."  How 
little  incredible  was  it  to  him,  the  highest  philosophic  in- 
tellect the  world  has  ever  seen,  that  some  incarnate  mes- 
senger of  God,  or  teacher  supernaturally  sent,  may  some- 
time come  to  enlighten  the  world!  What  in  fact  does  he 
tell  us,  but  that  he  is  waiting  for  Jesus  the  Christ ! 

At  a  later  period,  or  about  the  time  of  Christ,  when  the 
faith  of  the  ancient  religion  or  mythology  had  become 
more  nearly  extinct,  the  struggle  of  souls,  shut  up  to  the 
mere  darkness  of  nature  and  reason,  became  more  sad  and 
painful.  Strabo,  for  example,  falling  back  on  the  religion  of 
Moses,  received  from  him  a  faith  in  one  Supreme  Essence, 
who  he  thought  should  be  worshiped  without  images  in 
sacred  groves;  and  there,  he  said,  "the  devout  should  lay 
themselves  down  to  sleep,  and  expect  signs  from  God  in 
dreams."*  Not  daring  to  look  for  any  waking  experience 
of  God  supernaturally  revealed  in  the  soul,  he  must  still 
indulge  the  hope  that  the  Eternal  will,  at  least,  come  to  it 

*Lib.  XVI.,  Chap.  2. 


FOB  A  SUPERNATURAL  REVELATION.   247 

in  the  land  of  sleep  and  dreams.  Poor  Pliny,  confessing 
too  the  wretched  hunger  of  his  soul,  saw  no  relief  to  it 
better  than  suicide.  "It  is  difficult,"  he  writes,  "to  say 
whether  it  might  not  be  better  for  men  to  be  wholly  with- 
out religion,  than  to  have  one  of  this  kind  [viz.,  that  of 
his  country,]  which  is  a  reproach  to  its  object.  The  vani- 
ty of  man,  and  his  insatiable  longing  after  existence,  have 
led  him  also  to  dream  of  a  life  after  death.  A  being  full 
of  contradictions,  he  is  the  most  wretched  of  creatures, 
since  the  other  creatures  have  no  wants  transcending  the 
bounds  of  their  nature.  Man  is  full  of  desires  and  wants 
that  reach  to  infinity,  and  can  never  be  satisfied.  Among 
these  so  great  evils,  the  best  thing  God  has  bestowed  on 
man  is  the  power  to  take  his  own  life."*  Scarcely  less 
sad  is  the  desperation  of  the  pagan  Cecilius,  represented 
in  the  dialogue  of  Minutius  Felix,  as  maintaining  that, 
without  any  reasonable  evidence  for  the  old  religion,  they 
must  yet  cling  to  it  as  a  tradition ;  for  he  felt  that  they 
must  have  some  semblance  of  a  religion,  some  opinion  of 
a  supernatural  care  and  a  converse  of  Deity  with  men. 
"How  much  better  is  it,"  he  said,  "to  receive  just  what 
our  fathers  have  told  us,  to  worship  the  gods  they 
taught  us  to  reverence,  even  before  we  could  have  any  true 
knowledge  of  them,  to  allow  ourselves  no  right  of  private 
judgment,  but  to  believe  our  ancestors  who,  in  the  infan- 
cy of  mankind,  near  the  birth  of  the  world,  were  even 
considered  worthy  of  having  the  gods  for  their  friends." 
What  a  strait  is  this  for  an  intelligent  being  to  be  in — 
holding  fast,  by  his  will,  upon  the  belief  of  a  supernatural 
approach  of  the  gods,  in  times  gone  by,  without  any  pres- 
ent evidence! 

*  Hist.  Nat.,  Lib.  VIL 


248  IN    ALL    WHICH,    THEY    ARE 

It  is  a  very  fine  thing  for  many,  saturated  as  they  are 
with  Christian  truth,  and  all  but  oppressed  with  the  evi- 
dences of  a  new  creating  grace  and  gospel,  to  invent  spec- 
ulative difficulties,  and  finally  take  it  up  as  wisdom  or  the 
better  reason,  to  believe  in  nothing  but  mere  nature,  and 
her  laws.  But  the  recoil  of  the  soul  from  such  negations 
will  come  after,  and  it  will  be  terrible  quite  beyond  their  con- 
ception. We  see  this  in  the  facts  just  stated,  and  yet  more 
affectingly  in  the  history  of  Clement  the  Roman,  and  of  his 
conversion.  He  tells  how  he  was  harrassed  from  his  child- 
hood, by  questions  which  paganism  could  not  help  him  to 
answer;  such  as  relate  to  his  being  and  immortality,  the 
origin  of  the  world  and  its  continuance,  when  it  began, 
when  it  will  end,  and  whither  his  present  life  is  to  carry 
him.  "Incessantly  haunted,"  he  says,  "by  such  thoughts 
as  these,  which  came  I  knew  not  whence,  I  was  sorely 
troubled,  so  that  I  grew  pale  and  emaciated.  *  *  *  I 
resorted  to  the  schools  of  the  philosophers,  hoping  to  find 
some  certain  foundation.  I  saw  nothing  but  the  piling  up 
and  tearing  down  of  theories.  Thus  was  I  driven  to 
and  fro,  by  the  different  representations,  and  forced  to 
conclude  that  things  appear,  not  as  they  are  in  them- 
selves, but  as  they  happen  to  be  presented  on  this  or  that 
side.  I  was  made  dizzier  than  ever,  and  from  the  bottom 
of  my  heart,  sighed  for  deliverance."*  Then  he  tells  how 
he  resolved  to  visit  Egypt,  the  land  of  mysteries  and  ap- 
paritions, there  to  hunt  up  some  magician  who  could 
summon  a  spirit  for  him  from  the  other  world;  for  he 
thought,  if  he  could  see  a  spirit,  that  would  settle  the  ques- 
tion of  immortality,  and  give  him  a  fixed  point  of  truth. 
But  in  this  unhappy  state,  inquiring,  distressed,  agitated,  he 

*Neander's  Hist,  Vol.  I.,  pp.  32-33. 


WITNESSES    FOR    CHRIST.  249 

fell  in  with  a  Christian  gospel,  heard  it  preached,  there  dis- 
covered what  his  soul  had  been  aching  so  long  and  bitterly 
to  find,  and  there  he  found  rest. 

These  illustrations  from  history  show  us  most  effectu- 
ally how  little  of  true  science  there  is,  after  all,  in  those 
who  boast  the  laws  of  progress,  or  a  gospel  of  self-culti- 
vation, as  more  rational  and  hopeful  than  a  gospel  of  faith. 
After  all,  they  may  see  that,  when  left  to  the  proper  dark- 
ness of  nature,  it  is  no  such  rational  and  luminous  state  as 
they  thought,  but  a  night  of  gloom,  a  longing  vacancy,  a 
hunger  insupportable.  Nature  has  no  promise  for  society, 
least  of  all,  any  remedy  for  sin. 


CHAPTER  IX. 

THE   SUPERNATURAL  COMPATIBLE  WITH   NATURE  AND 
SUBJECT  TO  FIXED  LAWS 

IF,  as  we  have  shown,  there  is  no  hope  for  man,  or  human 
society,  under  sin,  save  in  the  supernatural  interposition  of 
God,  we  are  led  to  inquire,  in  the  next  place,  what  rational 
objection  there  may  be  to  such  an  interposition  ?  And  we 
find  two  objections  alledged.  First,  that  any  such  inter- 
ference of  supernatural  agency  is  incompatible  with  the 
order  of  nature.  Secondly,  that  the  supernatural  agency 
supposed,  is  itself  dispensed  without  law,  and  contrary,  in 
that  view,  to  reason.  Of  these  I  will  speak  in  their  order. 
And- 

I.  I  undertake  to  show  that  the  supernatural  divine 
agency,  required  to  provide  an  efficacious  remedy  for  sin, 
is  wholly  compatible  with  nature ;  involving  no  breach  of 
her  laws,  or  disturbance  of  their  systematic  action. 

I  have  already  shown  that  nature  is  not,  in  any  proper 
and  complete  sense,  the  system  of  God,  but  is  in  fact  a 
subordinate  member  only,  of  a  higher  and  virtually  super- 
natural system,  to  whose  uses  it  is  subject.  It  is,  in  fact, 
a  Thing ;  while  the  real  kingdom  of  God  is  a  kingdom  of 
Powers,  Himself  the  Eegal  Power.  Both  He  and  they 
are  continually  using  the  Thing,  and  pouring  their  activity 
into  it,  as  the  medial  point  of  their  relationship ;  and  this, 
in  a  way,  we  now  propose  to  show,  that  is  nowise  incom- 
patible with  its  laws ;  for  the  very  sufficient  reason  that, 
by  these  laws,  it  is  originally  submitted  to  their  activity. 
Not  even  what  we  call  the  distemper  and  disorder  of 


COMPATIBLE    WITH    NATURE.  251 

wrong  supposes  any  overturning  of  those  laws ;  it  is  only 
a  result  of  mischief,  produced  by  throwing  in  that  which 
provokes  their  penal  consequences.  In  the  same  manner, 
it  will  be  seen  that  not  even  miracles,  wrought  by  a  super- 
natural divine  agency,  necessarily  imply  any  removal,  or 
suspension  of  such  laws ;  for  nature  is  subjected,  by  her 
laws,  both  to  God's  activity  and  to  ours,  to  be  thus  acted 
on,  and  varied  in  her  operation,  by  the  new  combinations 
or  conjunctions  of  causes,  they  are  able  to  produce.  Ac- 
cordingly every  result  produced,  in  this  manner,  whether 
by  God  or  by  men,  represents  nature  supernaturally  acted 
on,  not  nature  overturned;  that  is,  it  is  natural  in  one 
view,  in  another  supernatural ;  natural  as  coming  to  pass 
under  and  by  the  laws  of  nature ;  supernatural  as  coming 
to  pass  by  new  conjunctions  of  causes,  which  are  made  by 
the  action  of  wills  upon  nature. 

What  an  immense  action  upon  nature  are  we  ourselves 
seen  to  have,  as  a  race,  when  we  consider  the  multifarious 
wheels  and  engines  we  have  put  at  work,  the  heavy  bur- 
dens we  carry  round  the  globe  in  our  ships,  the  structures 
we  raise,  the  cultivation  we  practice.  We  make  the  world, 
in  fact,  another  world.  All  of  which  is  refemble  to  a  force 
supernatural,  in  the  last  degree.  Nature,  unapplied  or 
uncombined  by  our  wills,  could  do  no  such  thing.  Wills 
only  have  this  power,  and  wills  are  supernatural.  If  now 
we  have  a  power  so  immense  over  the  world,  as  we  see  in 
all  our  works  and  wonders  of  contrivance,  is  it  credible 
that  God  can  have  no  way  of  access  to  nature,  no  power 
at  all  over  nature  ?  Is  he  the  only  will  excluded  from  a 
sovereignty  over  it? 

To  illustrate  this  point  yet  farther,  we  will  suppose 
a  company  of  youth  or  children,  engaged  in  playing  at 


252  THE    SUPERNATURAL 

ball.  The  ball  is  an  inert  spherical  substance,  that  will 
lie  on  the  ground  forever,  unless  it  is  raised  by  some  cause 
out  of  itself,  and  will  never  act,  save  as  it  is  acted  on.  It 
has  a  certain  tenacity  of  parts  and  an  elastic  body,  but  no 
power  in  itself  to  move.  Nevertheless  we  see  it  flying 
through  the  air  in  lively  play,  smitten,  caught,  thrown— 
the  central  object  and  instrument  of  what  is  called  a  game ; 
that  is  of  a  social  strife  between  the  players.  It  is,  for  the 
lime,  a  medium  of  commerce,  in  the  lively  battle  of  its 
motions,  between  so  many  contesting  agents.  But  the 
motions  it  has  in  the  air,  we  observe,  represent  so  many 
arms  throwing  it  by  its  weight,  or  driving  it  by  its  elas- 
ticity. So  far  its  play  is  natural  only.  Then,  if  we  in- 
quire what  moves  the  arms,  we  discover  that  it  is  done  by 
the  sudden  contraction  of  muscles,,  acting  under  purely 
mechanical  principles,  and  this  is  natural.  If  now  we 
push  our  inquiry  still  farther,  asking  why  the  muscles 
contracted  thus  and  thus,  we  discover  that  this  also  hap- 
pened, by  reason  of  mandates  sent  down  to  them  on  the 
nervous  cord,  which,  again,  was  equally  natural.  But,  if 
we  go  still  farther  and  ask  what  originated  or  caused  the 
wills  to  originate  the  mandates,  the  true  answer  is,  that  it 
was  the  wills  themselves,  acting  by  no  causation,  able  to 
act  or  not ;  so  that,  if  some  one  or  more  of  the  players  is 
a  truant  from  school,  or  from  home,  transgressing,  in  the 
play,  a  direct  order  of  restriction,  he  will  know  that  he  is 
doing  wrong  and  blame  himself  for  the  wrong  he  does , 
simply  because  it  is  an  immediate,  irresistible  conviction 
of  his  mind,  that  he  is  impelled  to  his  disobedience  by  no 
cause  whatever.  Doubtless  he  has  ends,  reasons,  motives, 
but  these  are  no  causes  of  his  act ;  for  he  knows  that  he 
could  and  ought  to  have  resisted  them  all  Here  then  we 


COMPATIBLE    WITH    NATUKE.  253 

finally  arrive  at  a  power  supernatural,  moving  all  the 
hands  and  bats  of  the  players.  The  ball  is  at  one  end  of 
so  many  chains  of  causes,  and  the  free  wills  of  the  players 
at  the  other.  The  ball  would  never  have  stirred  but  for 
the  arms,  nor  these  but  for  the  contractions  of  the  muscles, 
nor  these  contracted  but  for  the  mandates  sent  down  to 
them,  which  mandates,  in  the  last  degree,  are  the  peremp- 
tory acts  of  so  many  free  wills,  or  powers,  that  act  super- 
naturally,  from  no  causation.  Just  here  then  rises  the 
question,  if  the  play  is  thus  carried  on  by  causes  which, 
in  the  last  degree,  are  supernatural,  is  there  any  overturn- 
ing or  disorder  of  nature  implied  in  it?  Manifestly  not; 
and  for  the  simple  reason  that  the  bats,  and  arms,  and 
hands,  and  muscles,  are  by  their  very  laws  subordinated, 
as  chains  of  causes,  to  the  supernatural  power  that  wields 
them.  The  play  is  natural  therefore,  as  being  through 
and  by  those  subordinated  agents ;  and  supernatural,  as 
being  from  that  power.  We  have  no  thought  of  a  miracle 
in  the  case,  or  of  any  implied  overturning  of  nature 
which  is  shocking  to  our  faith.  On  the  contrary,  the 
event  is  so  common,  so  remote  from  any  thing  extraordi- 
nary, that  we  are  very  likely  to  look  upon  it  as  a  trans- 
action, wholly  in  the  world  of  natural  cause  and  effect. 

We  come  now  to  the  application.  Nature  is  to  God 
and  his  spiritual  and  free  creatures,  what  the  ball  is  to  the 
players.  In  one  view,  we  may  regard  the  Almighty 
Kuler  of  the  world  as  the  sensorium  and  active  brain  of 
the  world;  having  an  immediate  power  of  action  through 
every  member  and  every  line  of  causes  in  it;  able,  in 
that  manner,  to  maintain  a  constant  living  agency  in  its 
events,  without  really  infringing  its  order,  or  obstructing 
and  suspending  its  laws  in  any  instance.  Nature  is  pliant 

22 


254  THE    SUPERNATURAL 

thus  to  him,  as  the  body  of  the  players  to  them;  and 
as  the  natural  order  of  their  body  is  not  violated  by  the 
mandates  they  put  upon  it,  so  there  is  full  opportunity  for 
God  to  do  his  wonders  of  power  and  redemption  in  the 
earth,  without  violating  any  condition  of  natural  order 
and  system  whatever.  His  access  to  all  the  lines  of 
causes  in  nature  may  be  as  truly  normal  as  that  which 
the  soul  has,  at  that  secret  point  of  the  brain  where  it 
delivers  its  mandates  to  the  body. 

We  are  speaking  here,  it  will  be  observed,  not  of  God's 
possible  activity,  as  being  the  activity  of  nature.  That  is 
a  different  conception.  What  we  now  say  is,  that,  sup- 
posing all  the  forces  and  laws  of  nature  to  continue  for- 
ever, there  is  also  room  for  the  perpetual  acting  of  God 
upon  the  lines  of  causes  in  nature,  doing  his  will  super- 
naturally  in  it,  or  upon  it,  just  as  we  do,  and  yet  in  per- 
fect compatibility  with  the  laws  and  the  settled  order  of 
nature.  He  may  as  well  act  Himself  into  the  world  as 
we,  and  nature  will  as  little  be  overturned  by  his  action 
as  by  ours.  Nor  will  it  create  any  difficulty  that  He  acts 
like  Himself,  and  in  ways  proportionate  to  his  infinite 
majesty. 

That  nature  is  in  fact  submitted  to  his  action,  as  to 
ours,  in  the  manner  supposed,  is  evident  from  the  report 
of  science  itself.  For  when  the  geologists  show  that  new 
races  of  animal  and  vegetable  life  have  taken  a  begin- 
ning, at  successive  points  in  the  history  of  the  creation, 
that  whole  realms  of  living  creatures  disappear  again  and 
again,  to  be  succeeded  by  others  fresh  from  the  hand  of 
God,  what  does  it  signify  but  that  the  atoms  and  ele- 
mental forces  of  nature  are  so  related  to  God,  that  they 
do,  by  their  own  laws,  submit  themselves  to  his  will, 


COMPATIBLE    WITH    NATURE.  255 

flowing  into  new  combinations,  and  composing  thus  new 
germs  of  life?  These  successive  repopulations  of  the 
rocks  were  not  produced  by  so  many  overturnings  of 
nature — that  is  too  extravagant  for  belief,  and  stands  in 
no  harmony  with  what  we  know  of  God.  On  the  con- 
trary, every  element  of  force  and  every  atom  of  matter 
concerned  in  these  new  births  of  life,  was  acting,  we  are 
to  believe,  in  its  moment  of  new  combination,  precisely 
as,  according  to  its  inherent  properties  and  laws,  it  ever 
had  done  and  ever  will  do.  It  was  only  instigated  by  a 
divine  force  not  in  its  natural  laws;  and  in  the  quickening 
of  that,  yielding  itself  up,  by  these  laws,  to  organize  and 
live.  Nor  was  the  visitation  of  Mary,  glorious  and  sacred 
as  the  mystery  was,  a  transaction  at  all  different  in  prin- 
ciple, or  one  that  involved,  in  fact,  any  violation  of  nature 
not  involved  in  the  other  just  named.  So  also  when  we 
discover  the  world,  or  human  race,  groaning  under  the 
penal  disorders  and  bondage  of  sin,  the  deliverance  of 
those  disorders  by  a  supernatural  power  involves  no  over- 
turning of  the  causes  at  work,  or  the  laws  by  which  they 
work,  but  only  that  these  causes  are,  by  their  laws,  sub- 
mitted to  the  will  and  supernatural  action  of  God,  so  that 
he  can  arrange  new  conjunctions,  and  accomplish,  in  that 
manner,  results  of  deliverance.  Indeed,  a  physician  does 
precisely  the  same  thing  in  principle,  when,  appealing  as 
he  thinks  to  the  laws  of  substances,  he  brings  them  into 
combinations  that  are  from  himself,  and  places  them  in 
connections  to  exert  a  healing  force. 

It  will  farther  assist  our  conceptions  and  modify  our 
impressions  of  this  subject,  if  we  inquire  briefly  into  the 
office  and  probable  use  of  what  is  called  nature.  That 
nature  is  not  appointed  as  any  final  end  of  God,  we  have 


256  NATURE    IS    ADJUSTED 

before  shown.  It  is  only  ordained,  as  we  then  intimated, 
to  be  played  upon  by  the  powers ;  that  is,  by  God  himself 
and  all  free  agents  under  him.  Instead  of  being  the  ver- 
itable system  or  universe  of  God,  as  in  our  sensuality,  or 
scientific  conceit,  we  make  it,  we  may  call  it  more  truly 
the  ball  or  medial  substance  occupied  by  so  many  players ; 
that  is,  by  the  spiritual  universe  under  God  as  the  Lord  of 
Hosts.  There  could  be  no  commerce  of  so  many  players 
in  the  game  referred  to,  without  some  medium  or  medial 
instrument ;  and  the  instrument  needed  to  be  a  constant, 
invariable  substance,  as  regards  shape,  weight,  size,  elas- 
ticity, inertia,  and  all  the  natural  properties  pertaining  to 
it.  If  the  ball  changed  weight,  color,  density,  shape, 
every  moment,  no  skill  could  be  acquired  or  evinced  in 
the  use  of  it ;  there  would  be  no  real  test  in  the  game, 
and  no  social  commerce  of  play  in  the  parties  using  it. 
Therefore  it  needed  to  be,  so  far,  a  constant  quantity.  So, 
demonstrably,  there  needs  to  be,  between  us  and  God, 
and  between  us  and  one  another,  some  constant  quantity, 
so  that  we  can  act  upon  each  other,  trace  the  effects  of  our 
practice  and  that  of  others,  learn  the  mind  of  God,  the 
misery  and  baseness  of  wrong,  the  worth  of  principles, 
and  the  blessedness  of  virtue,  from  what  we  experience ; 
attaining  thus  to  such  a  degree  of  wisdom,  that  we  can 
set  our  life  on  a  footing  of  success  and  divine  approba- 
tion. What  we  call  nature  is  this  constant  quantity  inter- 
posed between  us  and  God,  and  between  us  and  each 
other — the  great  ball,  in  using  which,  our  life  battle  is 
played.  Or,  considering  the  grand  immensity  of  planetary 
worlds,  careering  through  the  fields  of  light,  all  these,  we 
may  say,  rolling  eternally  onward  in  their  rounds  of 
order,  bearing  their  wondrous  furniture  with  them,  such 


TO    RECEIVE    THE    SUPERNATURAL.          257 

as  science  discovers,  and  weaving  their  interminable  lines 
of  causes,  are  the  ball  of  exercise,  in  which,  and  by 
which,  God  is  training  and  teaching  the  spiritual  hosts 
of  his  empire.  They  are  set  in  a  system  of  immutable 
order  and  constancy  for  this  reason ;  but  with  the  design, 
beforehand,  that  all  the  free  beings  or  powers  shall  play 
their  activity  on  them  and  into  them,  and  that  He,  too, 
by  the  free  insertion  of  his,  may  turn  them  about  by  his 
counsel,  and  so  make  himself  and  his  counsel  open  to  the 
commerce  of  his  children. 

So  far,  therefore,  from  discovering  any  thing  undigni- 
fied or  superstitious  in  the  admission  of  a  supernatural 
agency  and  government  of  God  in  the  world,  it  is,  in  fact, 
the  only  worthy  and  exalted  conception.  It  no  more 
humbles  the  world  or  deranges  the  scientific  order  of  it 
to  let  God  act  upon  it,  than  to  let  man  do  the  same ;  as 
we  certainly  know  that  he  does,  without  any  thought  of 
overturning  its  laws.  On  the  other  hand,  to  imagine,  in 
the  way  of  dignifying  the  world,  that  God  must  let  it 
alone  and  simply  see  it  go,  is  only  to  confess  that  it  was 
made  for  no  such  glorious  intent  as  we  have  supposed. 

To  serve  this  intent,  two  things  manifestly  are  want- 
ed, and  one  as  truly  as  the  other;  viz.,  nature  and 
the  supernatural,  an  invariable,  scientific  order,  and  a 
pliant  submission  of  that  order  to  the  sovereignty  and 
uses  of  wills,  human  and  divine,  without  any  infringement 
of  its  constancy.  For  if  nature  were  to  be  violated  and 
tossed  about  by  capricious  overturnings  of  her  laws,  there 
would  be  an  end  of  all  confidence  and  exact  intelligence. 
And  if  it  could  not  be  used,  or  set  in  new  conjunctions, 
by  God  and  his  children,  it  would  be  a  wall,  a  catacomb, 
and  nothing  more.  And  yet  this  latter  is  the  world  of 

22* 


258  NO    RESTRICTION    THEREFORE 

scientific  naturalism,  a  world  that  might  well  enough 
answer  for  the  housing  of  manakins,  but  not  for  the  exer- 
cise of  living  men.  It  would  seem  to  be  enough  to  for- 
ever dissipate  any  such  unbelieving  tendencies,  simply  to 
have  caught,  for  once,  the  difference  between  the  constancy 
of  causes  separated  from  uses,  and  the  constancy  of  causes 
limbered  and  subjected  to  the  uses  of  eternal  freedom  and 
intelligence.  That  is  the  world  of  causation,  this  of  relig- 
ion ;  that  a  dumb-bell  exercise  for  arms  that  are  dumb- 
bells themselves,  this  a  living  order,  set  in  the  contact 
and  consecrated  to  the  uses  of  spirit;  that  a  world 
as  being  a  world,  this  a  grand  gymnasium  of  powers 
whom  God  is  training  for  society  and  commerce  with 
himself. 

Furthermore,  it  is  plain  that,  if  there  is  no  supernatural 
agency  of  God  permissible  or  credible  in  the  world,  then 
there  is  practically  no  government  over  it.  It  makes  no 
difference,  touching  the  point  here  in  question,  whether 
we  regard  nature  as  being  literally  a  machine,  wound  up 
to  run  by  its  own  causes  apart  from  God,  or  whether  we 
regard  the  causes  and  laws  as  being  themselves  the  imme- 
diate action  of  God,  always  present  to  them  and  in  them. 
For  if  he  is  present  thus,  only  as  the  soul  of  its  causes 
or  the  will  operating  in  its  laws,  then  that  presence,  if 
restricted,  as  naturalism  requires,  to  the  mere  run  of 
nature,  and  allowed  no  liberty  of  help  in  the  disorders 
of  evil,  is  scarcely  better  than  the  presence  of  Ixion 
at  his  wheel.  If  we  speak  of  God,  the  Almighty,  he  is  a 
being  mortgaged  for  eternity  to  the  round  of  nature ;  a 
grim  idol  for  science  to  worship,  but  no  Father  to  weak- 
ness or  Kedeemer  to  faith. 

Or  if  we  imagine  that  God  has  so  planned  the  world 


UPON    GOD'S    LIBERTY.  259 

of  nature  that,  running  on  by  its  own  inherent  laws  and 
causes,  it  will  always,  by  a  pre-established  harmony, 
bring  just  the  events  to  pass  that  are  wanted;  'soothe  the 
sorrows,  comfort  the  repentances,  hear  the  prayers,  redress 
the  wrongs,  chastise  the  crimes  of  his  subjects;  still  it  is 
with  our  faith  practically  as  if  it  were  living  in  a  mill, 
and  not  as  if  it  were  concerned,  hour  by  hour,  with  the 
living  God.  God  is  really  not  accessible.  We  have 
access  only  to  the  mill  we  are  in,  with  joy  to  feel  it  run- 
ning !  There  is  no  such  reciprocity  between  us  and  God 
as  to  answer  the  wants  of  our  hearts,  or  the  necessities  of 
our  moral  training. 

Besides,  if  it  be  maintained  that  nature  is  the  proper 
universe  of  God,  and  that  no  conception  is  admissible  of 
powers  outside  of  nature  acting  upon  it,  to  vary  the 
action  it  would  otherwise  have  by  itself,  then  follows  the 
very  shocking  consequence  that,  since  the  creation,  God 
has  had  and  can  hereafter  have  no  work  of  liberty  to  do. 
Nature  is  his  monument,  and  not  his  garment.  Not  only 
are  miracles  out  of  the  question,  but  counsel  and  action 
also.  He  is  under  a  scientific  embargo,  neither  hearing 
nor  helping  his  children,  nor  indeed  giving  any  signs  of 
recognition.  And  the  reason  is  worse,  if  possible,  and 
more  chilling  than  the  fact;  viz.,  that  if  he  should  stir, 
he  would  move  something  that  science  requires  to  be  let 
alone !  A  great  many  Christians  are  confused  and  chilled 
by  a  difficulty  resembled  to  this,  feeling,  when  they  go  to 
God  in  worship  or  prayer,  that  nothing  can  reasonably  be 
expected  of  him,  because  reason  allows  him  to  do  nothing. 
It  is  as  if  he  were  one  of  those  spent  meteors  to  which 
the  Indians  offer  sacrifice — a  hard,  cold  rock  of  iron, 
which  they  worship  for  the  noise  it  made  a  long  time  ago, 


260  THE    SUPERNATURAL    DISPENSED 

when  it  fell  from  the  sky,  and  not  because  it  is  likely  ever 
to  make  even  a  noise  again. 

Just  here,  the  view  we  are  advancing  is  seen  to  have 
an  immense  practical  as  well  as  speculative  consequence. 
It  finds  how  to  conceive  God  in  a  state  of  as  great  activity 
now,  as  he  was  when  he  made  the  world — always  active 
from  eternity  to  eternity.  Every  work  of  his  hand  is 
pliant  still  to  his  counsel.  He  is  doing  something,  able  to 
do  all  we  want.  In  all  events  and  changes  he  has  a  pres- 
ent concern.  He  turns  about  not  the  clouds  only,  but  all 
the  wheels  of  nature,  by  his  ever-living  power  and  gov- 
ernment. He  is  an  Agent,  as  much  more  real  than  Na- 
ture, as  he  is  wider  in  his  reach  and  more  sovereign.  He 
can  produce  variant  results  through  invariable  causes, 
and  so  can  make  the  world  of  things  keep  company  with 
the  variant  demands  of  want,  weakness,  wickedness,  and 
merit;  of  love,  truth,  justice,  and  holy  supplication,  in 
his  children.  It  is  no  longer  as  if,  at  some  given  point  in 
the  solitude  of  his  eternity,  he  waked  up  and  created  the 
worlds,  since  which  time  he  has  neither  done  nor  can 
ever  be  expected  to  do  any  thing  more,  because  it  is  the 
right  now  of  the  laws  of  nature  to  do  every  thing  unin- 
terrupted. Contrary  to  this,  he  is  the  Living  God,  and 
can  as  readily  meet  us  and  bend  himself  and  his  works 
to  our  condition  or  request,  as  a  man,  without  any  in- 
fringement of  his  body,  can  bend  it  to  his  uses.  Nature 
is  seen  to  be  subjected  to  his  constant  agency  by  its  laws 
themselves,  which  laws  he  has  never  to  suspend,  but  only 
to  employ,  having  the  great  realm  of  nature  flexible  as  a 
hand,  to  his  will  forever.  Now  he  is  no  more  fenced 
away  from  us  by  nature,  no  more  closeted  behind  it,  to 
sleep  away  his  deaf  and  idle  eternity ;  buft  he  is  with  us 


BY    FIXED    LAWS.  261 

and  about  us,  filling  all  things  with  his  potent  energy  and 
fatherly  counsel.  He  maintains  a  relationship  as  real  and 
practical  with  us,  as  we  have  with  each  other. 

II.  I  undertake,  in  opposition  to  the  objection  which 
supposes  that  the  supernatural  agency  of  God  is  itself  sub- 
ject to  no  law,  or  system,  to  show  that  it  is  regulated  and 
dispensed  by  immutable  and  fixed  laws.  As  intelligent 
creatures,  we  can  have  no  comfort  under  a  condition  ruled 
by  no  law  or  system,  and  conformed  to  no  principles  of  in- 
telligence. We  instinctively  demand  that  every  thing  in 
God's  plan  shall  stand  in  the  strict  unity  of  reason,  even 
as  the  old  astronomers  strive  to  comprehend  the  heavenly 
bodies  and  their  motions,  in  the  figures  of  geometry  and 
the  fixed  proportions  of  arithmetic.  This  high  instinct  of 
our  nature  God,  we  may  be  sure,  will  never  violate. 

1.  Since  God  has  inserted  in  our  nature  this  instinctive 
opinion  of  law,  as  necessary  to  the  honor  of  his  govern- 
ment and  the  comfort  of  our  reason  under  it,  we  have,  in 
the  fact,  a  very  certain  proof  that  his  government  will  be 
such  as  to  meet  our  respect,  and  satisfy  the  yearnings  of 
our  intelligence. 

2.  The  fact  that  nature  is  a  realm,  organized  under  fixed 
laws,  is  itself  the  best  and  most  satisfactory  evidence  that 
such  is  the  manner  of  God  also  in  things  supernatural. 
Who  that  simply  looks  on  the  heavenly  worlds,  for  exam- 
ple, can  suffer  a  doubt  afterward,  that  God  will  do  every- 
thing in  terms  of  law  and  strict  systematic  unity. 

3.  Since  God  is  the  sovereign  intelligence,  the  Perfect 
Eeason,  he  will  himself  have  an  affinity  for  law  and  sys- 
tematic unity,  as  much  stronger  than  we,  as  he  is  higher 
in  order  than  we,  and  broader  in  thp  Comprehension  of  hia 


262  THERE    ABE    DIFFERENT    KINDS 

understanding.  Hence  it  is  impossible  to  believe  that,  in 
any  thing,  even  the  smallest,  he  will  deviate  from  rules  of 
universal  application — least  of  all  in  the  highest  order  of 
his  works,  even  such  as  he  displays  in  the  grace  of  our 
redemption. 

4.  The  moral  and  religious  need  we  have  of  such  a  faith 
makes  it  indispensable.  To  let  go  of  such  a  faith,  or  lose 
it,  is  to  plunge  at  once  into  superstition.  If  any  Christian, 
the  most  devout,  believes  in  a  miracle,  or  a  providence 
that  is  done  outside  of  all  system  and  law,  he  is  so  far 
on  the  way  to  polytheism.  The  unity  of  God  always  per- 
ishes, when  the  unity  of  order  and  law  is  lost.  And  we 
may  as  well  believe  in  one  God,  acting  on  or  against  an- 
other, as  in  the  same  God  acting  outside  of  all  fixed  laws 
and  terms  of  immutable  order.  Indeed  I  suppose  it  was  in 
just  this  way  that  polytheism  began.  The  transition  is 
easy  and  natural,  from  a  superstitious  belief  in  one  God 
who  acts  without  system,  to  a  belief  in  many  who  will 
much  more  naturally  do  the  same. 

But  the  main  difficulty  here,  is  not  to  establish  a  reason- 
able conviction  that  the  supernatural  works  of  God  must 
be  dispensed  by  fixed  laws;  it  is  to  find  how  this  may 
be,  or  be  intelligently  conceived.  And  here  lies  the  main 
stress  of  our  present  inquiry. 

To  open  the  way  then  to  a  just  and  clear  conception  of 
the  great  fact  stated,  it  will  be  necessary  to  enter  into  some 
important  distinctions  concerning  law,  or  what  is  properly 
meant  by  the  word  law. 

The  word  is  used  with  many  varieties  of  meaning,  but 
always,  and  in  all  its  varieties,  having  one  element  that  is 
constant,  viz.,  the  opinion  had  of  its  uniformity;  as  that,  in 
exactly  the  same  circumstances,  it  will  always  and  forever 


AND    ORDERS    OF    LAWS.  263 

do,  bring  to  pass,  direct,  or  command  precisely  the  same 
thing.     Without  this  no  law  is  ever  regarded  as  a  law. 

Observing  this  fundamental  fact,  we  notice  the  distinc- 
tion next  of  natural  and  moral  law.  Natural  law  is  the 
law  by  which  any  kind  of  being  or  thing  is  made  to  act 
invariably,  thus  or  thus,  in  virtue  of  terms  inherent  in 
itself;  as  when  any  body  of  matter  gravitates  by  reason 
of  its  matter,  and  according  to  the  quantity  of  its  matter. 

Moral  law  pertains  never  to  a  thing,  or  to  any  substance 
in  the  chain  of  cause  and  effect,  but  only  to  a  free  intelli 
gence,  or  self-active  power.  Its  rule  is  authority,  not  force. 
It  commands,  but  does  not  actuate  or  determine.  It  speaks 
to  assent  or  choice,  inviting  action,  but  operating  nothing 
apart  from  choice.  It  imposes  obligation,  leaving  the  sub- 
ject to  obey  or  not,  clear  of  any  enforcement,  save  that  of 
conviction  beforehand,  and  penalty  afterward. 

It  will  be  seen  at  once  that  God's  supernatural  works  in 
Christ  and  the  Spirit  are  not  reducible  under  either  of 
these  two  kinds  of  law,  the  natural  or  the  moral.  To  a 
certain  extent  God's  nature  will  be  a  law  to  his  action, 
even  as  ours  is  a  necessary  law  to  us.  Thus,  if  we  are  in- 
telligent, our  intelligent  nature  will  manifest  effects  of  in- 
telligence. If  we  form  necessary  ideas  of  figure,  space, 
time,  truth,  right,  justice,  there  will  be  something  in  our 
action  that  reveals  these  ideas.  In  like  manner,  if  we  are 
free  agents,  it  is  made  impossible  for  us,  by  a  fixed  law  of 
nature,  to  act  as  mere  things,  under  the  law  of  cause  and 
effect.  So,  if  God  is  infinite  in  his  nature,  then  it  is  a  fixed 
law  of  his  nature  that  he  shall  indicate  infinity  in  his  ac- 
tion, and  if  he  has  geometric  ideas,  that  his  works  shall, 
by  a  necessary  consequence,  have  some  fixed  relation  to 
the  laws  of  geometry ;  such  as  we  discover  in  their  spheres, 


264  THERE    AEE    DIFFERENT    KINDS 

and  orbits,  and  projectile  curves,  and  in  the  subtle  trian- 
gulations  of  light.  Thus  it  is  rightly  affirmed  by  the 
great  Hooker,  that  "the  being  of  (rod  is  a  kind  of  law  to 
his  working."*  And  so  far  does  he  carry  this  opinion  as 
to  hint  the  probable  necessity  that  God,  being  both  one 
and  three,  an  essential  unity  and  a  threefold  personality, 
there  will,  of  course,  be  something  in  his  works  corres- 
pondent with  his  nature. 

So  again  if  we  speak  of  the  law  moral,  that  is  a  law  as 
completely  sovereign  over  God  as  it  is  over  us.  It  is  the 
eternal,  necessary  law  of  right,  or  of  love ;  a  law  that  he 
acknowledges  with  a  ready  and  full  assent  forever ;  that 
which  determines  the  immutable  order,  and  purity,  and 
glory  of  his  character.  And  then,  of  course,  the  law  ac- 
cepted in  his  own  character,  will  be  the  law  published  to 
his  subjects  to  be  the  rule  of  theirs.  Moral  law  then,  by 
the  free  consent  of  God,  shapes  the  divine  character,  and 
so  the  character  and  ends  of  his  government. 

But  though  natural  law  and  moral  law  have  much  to 
do,  as  here  discovered,  in  determining  and  molding  all  the 
conduct  of  God,  we  do  not  immediately  conceive  what  is 
meant  by  the  fact,  that  the  supernatural  works  of  God  are 
dispensed  by  fixed  laws,  till  we  bring  into  view  a  third 
kind  of  law,  viz.,  the  law  of  one's  end,  or  the  law  which 
one's  reason  imposes  in  the  way  of  attaining  his  end. 
Moral  law,  we  have  said,  shapes  the  character  of  God, 
and  that  determines  his  end.  Since  he  is  a  morally  perfect 
being  in  his  character,  moral  perfection  or  holiness  will  be 
the  last  end  of  his  being,  that  for  which  he  creates  and 
rules;  for,  if  he  were  to  value  holiness  only  as  the  means 
of  some  other  end,  such  as  happiness,  then  he  would  even 
*  Ecclesiastical  Polity,  Yol.  I.,  p.  72. 


AND    ORDERS    OF    LAWS.  265 

disrespect  holiness,  rating  it  only  as  a  convenience ;  which 
is  not  the  character  of  a  holy  being,  but  only  an  impos- 
ture in  the  name  of  such  a  character.  Kegarding  holiness 
then  as  God's  last  end,  his  world-plan  will  be  gathered 
round  the  end  proposed,  to  fulfill  it,  and  all  his  counsels 
will  crystallize  into  order  and  system,  subject  to  that  end. 
For  this  nature  will  exist,  in  all  her  vast  machinery  of 
causes  and  laws ;  to  this  all  the  miracles  and  supernatural 
works  of  redemption  will  bring  their  contributions.  Hav- 
ing this  for  his  end,  and  the  supernatural  as  means  to  his 
end,  the  divine  reason  will  of  course  order  all  under  fixed 
laws  of  reason,  which  laws  will  be  so  exact  and  universal 
as  to  make  a  perfect  system. 

How  this  may  result,  we  can  see  from  a  simple  reference 
to  ourselves.  Thus,  if  a  man  undertakes  to  be  honest, 
having  that  for  an  end,  then  it  will  be  seen  that  his  end  so 
far  becomes  a  law  to  all  his  actions;  that  is,  a  law  self- 
imposed,  one  which  his  reason  prescribes,  and  which,  in 
accepting  his  end,  he  freely  accepts.  So  if  a  man's  end  is 
to  be  rich,  we  shall  see  that  his  end  is  a  law  to  his  whole 
life-plan,  or  at  least  so  far  a  law  that  it  fails  only  where 
his  reason  or  judgment  falls  short  of  a  perfect  perception. 
Or  we  may  take  a  case  more  exact  and  palpable,  the  case 
of  a  player  at  the  game  of  chess.  The  end  he  proposes  is 
to  win  the  game,  and  that  end,  subordinating  his  reason 
or  skill,  will  become  a  law  to  every  move  he  makes  on  the 
diagram,  except  where  his  skill  is  at  fault,  or  his  under- 
standing short  of  comprehension.  If  now  we  suppose 
him  to  be  gifted  with  a  perfect  skill,  or  an  all-perceiving 
reason,  it  will  result  that  every  move  made  will  be  deter- 
mined with  such  exactness  and  uniformity,  that,  if  he  were 
to  play  the  game  over  a  million  of  times,  he  would  never, 

28 


266    GOD'S    LAWS,    IN    THE    SUPERNATURAL, 

in  a  single  case,  move  differently,  in  exactly  the  same  cir- 
cumstances. 

Here  then  is  what  we  mean  by  affirming  that  all  God's 
supernatural  acts,  providences,  and  works,  supernatural 
though  they  be,  will  yet  be  dispensed,  in  all  cases,  by  immu- 
table, universal,  and  fixed  laws.  It  will  be  so  because 
his  end  never  varies  and  his  reason  is  perfect.  Therefore 
his  world-plan,  though  comprehending  the  supernatural, 
will  be  an  exact  and  perfect  system  of  order,  centered  in 
the  eternal  unity  of  reason  about  his  last  end.  There 
will  be  nothing  desultory  in  it,  nothing  irregular,  nothing 
so  particular  as  to  happen  apart  from  rule  and  universal 
counsel.  The  order  of  the  heavens,  and  the  angles  of  the 
light  will  not  be  more  perfect,  because  the  reason  of  the 
supernatural  is  equally  precise  and  clear.  The  same 
work  will  always  be  done,  in  the  same  circumstances, 
without  a  semblance  of  variation.  Even  as  the  dial, 
under  the  laws  of  nature,  will  make  the  same  shadow,  at 
the  same  hour,  for  an  eternal  succession  of  days,  so  the 
good  gift  and  perfect  from  above  will  come  down  from 
the  Father  of  lights,  punctual  and  true  in  its  order,  as 
from  one  whose  counsel  is  perfect,  and  with  whom  is  no 
variableness,  neither  shadow  of  turning.  Order,  everlast- 
ing order,  reigns  where  least  we  look  for  it,  and  where  the 
unthinking  and  crude  mind  of  superstition  would  deem  it 
even  a  merit,  that  God  had  broken  loose  from  his  eternity 
of  law,  to  bless  the  world  at  will. 

But  how  is  it  conceivable,  some  one  may  ask,  that  such 
works  as  are  comprehended  in  the  range  of  human  re- 
demption should  take  place,  systematically,  under  fixed 
laws  ?  To  this,  we  answer  that  it  is  not  necessary  to  such 
a  conviction  that  we  should  be  able  to  conceive  how  these 


ARE    SHAPED    BY    HIS    ENDS.  267 

operate,  or  what  they  are.  All  we  meed  is  to  find  the 
possible  and  probable  fact ;  which  having  found,  we  can 
as  little  doubt,  or  dismiss  the  conviction  of  some  presiding 
law,  as  we  can  the  faith  of  universal  laws  in  nature,  where 
we  do  not  know  the  laws,  or  can  not  discover  the  secret 
of  their  action.  For  example,  we  know,  in  general,  what 
is  the  law  of  miracles;  viz.,  that  they  are  wrought  as 
attestations  of  a  divine  mission  in  those  by  whom  they 
are  wrought ;  but  their  particular  occasions,  times,  and 
properties,  why  wrought  by  this  and  not  by  another,  why 
at  one  time,  or  in  one  age,  and  not  in  succeeding  ages,  we 
may  not  be  able  to  discover.  The  law  is  beyond  our 
investigation,  but  that  there  is  a  law,  and  that  exactly  the 
same  miracles  will  be  wrought,  if  wrought  at  all,  in  ex- 
actly the  same  conditions,  or  spiritual  connections,  even 
to  eternity,  we  have  no  more  room  to  doubt,  than  we  have 
to  question  God's  intelligence.  For,  if  God's  end  is  the 
same,  he  can  never  deviate  or  omit  to  do  exactly  the  same 
things,  in  exactly  the  same  circumstances,  without  some 
defect  of  intelligence.  Either  now,  or  before,  he  must 
confess  to  a  mistake.  If  he  is  perfect  in  wisdom  now,  he 
was  not  then ;  if  then,  he  is  not  now.  But  when  we  say 
"exactly  the  same  circumstances,"  it  is  important  for  us 
to  notice  the  extent  of  the  qualification;  for  this  will 
bring  into  view  a  great  principle  of  distinction  be- 
tween the  natural  and  the  supernatural,  apart  from  which 
the  extraordinary  and  apparently  desultory  manifestations 
of  the  latter  can  not  be  understood.  Nature  is  a  machine, 
compounded  of  wheels  and  moved  by  steady  powers. 
Hence  it  goes  in  rounds  or  cycles,  returning  again  and 
again  into  itself,  producing,  thus,  seasons,  months,  and 
years;  repeating  its  dews,  and  showers,  and  storms,  and 


268  THEY    OPERATE    AS    LAWS, 

varied  temperatures ;  in  the  same  circumstances,  or  times, 
doing  much  the  same  things.  But  it  is  not  so  in  the 
affairs  of  a  mind,  a  society,  or  an  age.  There  the  motion 
is  never  in  circles,  but  onward,  eternally  onward.  Noth- 
ing is  ever  repeated.  No  mind  or  spirit  can  reproduce  a 
yesterday.  No  age,  the  age  or  even  year  that  is  past. 
The  combinations  of  circumstances  may  have  a  certain 
analogy,  but  they  are  never  the  same,  or  even  nearly  so. 
If  they  are  near  enough  to  require  a  repetition,  by  the 
Saviour,  of  his  miracle  of  the  loaves,  they  will  yet  be  so 
far  different  as  to  require  a  difference  in  the  miracle. 
And  where  the  outward  conditions  appear  to  be  exactly 
the  same,  the  inward  states  and  spiritual  connections  may 
be  so  various  as  to  take  away  all  resemblance ;  requiring 
Paul  to  raise  a  Publius  out  of  his  fever  at  Malta,  and 
leave  a  Trophimus  sick  at  Miletum.  We  have  no  argu- 
ment against  uniformity  and  law  in  such  diversities ;  for, 
in  reality,  there  is  no  recurrence  of  circumstances  and  condi- 
tions such  as,  at  first  view,  might  be  supposed.  So,  if  mir- 
acles appear  in  one  age  and  not  in  another,  it  is  because 
the  world  is  moving  on  in  a  right  line,  reproducing  no 
conditions  and  circumstances  of  the  past,  but,  by  condi- 
tions always  new,  is  demanding  a  treatment  correspond- 
ently  new.  Hence,  while  the  course  of  nature  is  a  round 
of  repetitions,  the  course  of  the  supernatural  repeats 
nothing,  and  for  that  reason  takes  an  aspect  of  variety 
that  appears  even  to  exclude  the  fact  of  law.  But  it  is  so 
only  in  appearance.  God's  perfect  wisdom  still  requires 
the  same  things  to  be  done  in  the  same  circumstances ; 
and,  when  not  the  same,  as  nearly  the  same  as  the  cir- 
cumstances are  nearly  resembled.  Every  thing  transpires 
in  the  uniformity  of  law. 


WITH    ETERNAL    UNIFORMITY.  269 

Thus  we  may  assert  as  confidently,  as  if  it  occurred  a 
hundred  times  a  day,  that  a  supernatural  event,  never 
known  to  occur  but  once,  takes  place  under  an  immutable 
and  really  universal  law;  such,  for  example,  as  the  great, 
world-astounding  miracle  of  the  incarnation.  In  exactly 
the  same  conditions,  if  they  were  to  occur  a  million  of 
times  in  the  universe,  (which  may  or  may  not  be  a  vio- 
lent supposition,)  precisely  the  same  miracle  also  would 
recur,  and  that  with  as  great  certainty  as  the  natural  law 
of  gravity  will  cause  a  stone  to  fall,  when  for  the  mil- 
lionth time  its  support  is  taken  away.  Living  here  upon 
this  ant-hill,  which  we  call  the  world,  and  seeing  only  the 
yard  of  space  and  the  day  of  time  our  field  occupies,  we 
are  likely  to  judge  that  an  event  which  never  occurred 
but  once  since  the  world  began,  must  be  an  event  apart 
from  all  order  and  system ;  even  as  a  savage,  but  a  little 
more  childish  than  we,  might  imagine  that  some  new 
deity  is  breaking  into  the  world,  when  he  sees  the  air- 
stone  fall,  because  he  never  saw  the  like  before.  Indeed, 
we  have  only  to  look  into  the  appearings  of  the  Jehovah 
angel,  previous  to  the  incarnate  appearing  of  the  Word, 
noting  all  the  approaches  and  gradual  preparations  of  the 
event,  to  see  how  certainly  God  has  a  way  and  a  law  for 
it,  and  will  not  bring  it  to  pass  till  the  law  decrees  it  and 
the  fullness  of  time  is  come.  Could  we  look  into  the  his- 
tory, too,  of  the  innumerable  other  worlds  God  has  com- 
prehended in  his  reign,  what  a  lesson  might  we  thence 
derive  from  events  counterpart  to  this  of  the  incarnation, 
varied  only  to  meet  the  varied  conditions  of  their  want, 
character,  and  destiny.  Though  we  may  not  be  able, 
creatures  of  a  day,  to  unfold  the  law  of  this  grand  mira- 
cle, and  reduce  it  to  a  formula  of  science,  how  little  reason 

23* 


270       THEY    ARE    OFTEN    AS    WELL    KNOWN 

have  we,  in  our  inability,  to  question  the  fact  of  such  a 
law. 

Besides,  it  is  a  fact  ,-that  the  laws  of  a  great  many  of 
God's  supernatural  works  are  made  known,  or  discovered 
to  us.  Thus  God  dispenses  the  Holy  Spirit  by  fixed  laws. 
Prayer,  also,  is  heard  by  laws  as  definite  as  the  laws  of 
equilibrium  in  forces.  And  what  is  called  the  doctrine 
of  the  Spirit  and  the  doctrine  of  prayer,  as  given  in  the 
scriptures,  is,  in  fact,  nothing  more  nor  less  than  the  un- 
folding to  us,  if  we  could  so  regard  it,  of  the  laws  of  the 
Spirit  and  the  laws  of  prayer,  as  pertaining  to  the  super- 
natural kingdom  of  God.  Indeed,  there  is  wanting  now, 
for  the  more  intelligent  guidance  of  Christian  disciples,  to 
consolidate  their  faith  and  save  them  from  the  extrava- 
gances of  fanaticism,  a  practical  treatise  on  the  laws  of 
prayer,  of  spiritual  gifts,  and  of  the  dispensation  of  the 
Holy  Spirit  generally.  These  two  great  powers,  the 
hearing  of  prayer  and  the  dispensing  of  the  Spirit,-  are 
like  the  waterfalls  and  winds  of  nature,  to  which  we  set 
our  wheels  and  lift  our  sails,  and  so,  by  their  known  laws, 
take  advantage  of  their  efficacy.  A  crystal,  or  gem,  that 
is  being  distilled  and  shaped  in  the  secret  depths  of  the 
world,  is  not  shaped  by  laws  as  well  understood  as  the 
law  of  the  Spirit  of  life,  when  it  molds  the  secret  order 
and  beauty  of  a  soul. 

Our  conclusion  therefore  is,  that  all  God's  works,  even 
such  as  are  most  distinctly  supernatural,  are  determined 
by  fixed  laws.  This  is  true  of  all  supernatural  events, 
with  the  single  exception  of  the  bad  and  wicked  actions 
of  men.  And  these  are  out  of  all  terms  of  law,  not  be- 
cause they  are  supernatural,  but  only  because  they  are 
bad.  Indeed,  it  is  a  somewhat  singular  and  even  curious 


AS    THE    LAWS    OP    NATURE.  271 

fact,  that  while  so  great  jealousy  is  felt  in  our  time,  of 
miracles  and  all  immediate  spiritual  operations  of  God,  as 
being  so  many  violations  of  order  and  fixed  law  in  the 
universe,  the  only  known  events  in  the  world,  of  which 
that  is  really  true,  are  the  bad  actions  of  bad  men,  or  of 
bad  spirits  generally.  These  are  not  subject  to  any  fixed 
laws ;  they  consent  to  no  law.  They  are  determined,  nei- 
ther by  the  laws  of  causality,  nor  by  the  laws  of  a  good 
end;  which  are  laws  of  reason,  truth,  and  beneficence. 
They  have  no  agreement  with  the  world,  or  with  God,  or 
even  with  the  constituent  well-being  of  the  doers  them- 
selves. All  that  can  be  apprehended  of  miracles  is  true 
of  them  and  even  more.  Their  damning  miracle  is  every 
where,  and  the  confusion  they  make  is  real.  If  those  per- 
sons who  are  so  ready  to  apprehend  some  destruction,  or 
implied  destruction  of  law  in  the  faith  of  miracles,  would 
turn  their  thoughts  upon  these  real  disorders,  and  con- 
ceive them  as  the  only  known  facts  in  our  world  that  have 
no  subjection  to  law,  they  would  have  a  good  point  of  be- 
ginning for  the  cure  of  their  skepticism  generally. 

It  can  not  be  necessary  to  pursue  this  topic  farther. 
But  it  may  be  well  to  notice,  before  we  drop  the  subject, 
one  or  two  false  impressions  very  commonly  entertained 
by  the  natural  philosophers  and  poets  of  nature,  whose 
skepticism  is  oftener  grounded  in  such  impressions  than  in 
formal  arguments.  They  are  greatly  impressed  by  the 
immutable  reign  of  order  and  law  in  nature,  deeming  it 
the  highest  point  of  sublimity,  in  all  the  known  manifest- 
ations of  God.  Not  seldom  indeed  is  this  point  magnified 
by  them,  in  terms  of  admiration,  that  reflect  a  certain  con- 
tempt on  the  Christian  ideas  of  God ;  as  if  it  were  possible 


272  GOD'S  HIGHEST  WORK 

only  to  an  overeasy  credulity,  to  imagine  that  God  will 
descend  from  his  high  position  of  law,  to  do  such  things 
as  the  preaching  and  praying  disciples  of  Christianity  ex- 
pect of  Him.  Gazing  into  the  sky,  and  beholding  the 
eternal,  changeless  roll  of  the  worlds,  every  orb  in  the 
track,  where  the  astrologers  of  Babylon  and  Egypt  saw  it 
long  ages  ago,  never  to  vary  or  falter  in  the  longer  ages  to 
come — image,  how  sublime,  they  exclaim,  of  the  divine 
greatness !  Greater  and  sublimer  still,  that  the  same  un- 
deviating  rule  of  law  is  equally  conspicuous  in  the  small- 
est things;  that  in  every  salt  and  pebble  there  is  a  little 
astronomy  of  atoms  whose  laws  are  as  old  as  the  stars, 
and  whose  constancy  is  a  reflection  of  theirs!  No,  the 
wonder  of  God's  way  is  not  here,  but  it  is  that  he  can 
make  constancy  flexible  to  so  many  myriads  of  uses,  and 
the  uses  themselves — all  but  the  abuses — a  system  of  or- 
der and  law,  as  complete  and  perfect  as  that  of  the  stars. 
Constancy,  as  a  mere  post,  or  position,  has  no  dignity. 
The  true  dignity  and  miracle  of  order  is  constancy  made 
flexible  to  use  and  expression.  Sir  Charles  Bell  had  no 
such  thought  as  that  he  could  magnify  the  beauty  of  God's 
way  in  the  hand,  by  simply  showing  the  curious  articula- 
tions by  which  it  is  mechanically  strengthened  in  its  gripe; 
the  chief  wonder,  the  real  miracle  of  beauty  in  the  in- 
strument, as  he  well  understood,  lies  in  its  flexibility,  its 
ready  submission  to  so  many  and  such  endlessly  varied 
uses.  Let  us  not  be  taken  by  the  mere  stability  of  nature, 
because  it  compliments  our  vanity  by  the  easy  understand- 
ing it  permits.  Magnitudes,  weights,  distances,  regulari- 
ties, are  not  the  highest  symbols  of  God's  creative  dignity. 
The  glory,  the  true  sublimity  of  God's  architectural  wis- 
dom is  that,  while  his  work  stands  fast  in  immutable  or- 


IS    NOT    THE    WORLD    OP    NATURE,  273 

der,  it  bends  so  gracefully  to  the  humblest  things,  without 
damage  or  fracture,  pliant  to  all  free  action,  both  His  and 
ours ;  receiving  the  common  play  of  our  liberty,  and  be- 
coming always  a  fluent  medium  of  reciprocal  action  be- 
tween us;  to  Him  a  hand  showing  his  handy  work,  or 
even  a  tongue  which  day  unto  day  uttereth  speech,  and 
night  unto  night  showeth  forth  knowledge  of  Him;  to  us 
the  ground  of  our  works,  the  instrument  of  our  choices, 
and  yet,  in  the  order,  all,  of  a  perfect  counsel  and  of  laws 
as  immutable  as  his  throne.  In  this  rests  the  doctrine  of 
faith,  the  doctrine  that  justifies  prayer,  enables  the  disciple 
to  believe  that  God  can  notice  him,  and  move  among 
causes  to  help  him ;  raising  him  thus  into  a  state  of  ennobled 
consciousness,  how  superior  to  the  low  mechanical  skepti- 
cism which  thinks  itself  dignified  in  the  discovery  that 
God,  incrusted  in  the  stiffness  of  his  scientific  order,  has 
no  longer  any  power  to  bend  himself  to  man. 

The  other  point  alluded  to  has  reference  to  the  compar- 
ative estimate  of  nature  and  the  supernatural.  Unexer- 
cised  in  the  great  world  of  Christian  thought,  uninitiated 
by  years  of  holy  experience  in  its  deep  mysteries,  the  nat- 
ural philosopher  and  poet  very  commonly  look  upon  the 
supernatural,  or  what  is  the  same,  Christianity,  as  com- 
prised of  a  few  stray  facts,  or  ghostly  wonders,  much  less 
credible  than  they  might  be,  and  turn  away,  with  a  kind 
of  pity,  from  a  field  so  narrow,  to  what  they  call  a  broad- 
er and  more  satisfactory  teaching;  that  of  the  great  school 
of  nature.  Here  is  variety  they  say,  beauty,  magnifi- 
cence, greatness,  and  a  sound,  consistent  order,  worthy  of 
God.  This,  they  imagine,  is  the  true  revelation. 

How  little  do  such  minds  conceive  what  the  world  of 
supernatural  fact  comprises.  Go  to  nature  for  the  great 


274  AND    THE    HIGHEST    SUBJECTS 

and  quickening  thoughts,  the  wonders  and  broad  truths 
Call  nature  the  grand  revelation !  Is  it  more  to  go  to  na- 
ture and  know  it,  than  to  know  (rod  ?  Are  there  deeper 
depths  in  nature,  higher  sublimities,  thoughts  more  capti- 
vating and  glorious?  In  the  mineral  and  vegetable  shapes 
are  there  finer  themes  than  in  the  life  of  Jesus?  In  the 
storms  and  gorgeous  pilings  of  the  clouds,  are  there  man- 
ifestations of  greatness  and  beauty  more  impressive  than 
in  the  tragic  sceneries  of  the  cross?  Nature  is  the  realm 
of  things,  the  supernatural  is  the  realm  of  powers.  There 
the  spinning  worlds  return  into  their  circles  and  keep  re- 
turning. Here  the  grand  life-empire  of  mind,  society, 
truth,  liberty,  and  holy  government  spreads  itself  in  the 
view,  unfolding  always  in  changes  vast,  various,  and  di- 
vinely beneficent.  There  we  have  a  Georgic,  or  a  hymn 
of  the  seasons;  here  an  epic  that  sings  a  lost  Paradise. 
There  God  made  the  wheels  of  his  chariot  and  set  them 
rolling.  Here  he  rides  forth  in  it,  leading  his  host  after 
Him;  vast  in  counsel,  wonderful  in  working;  preparing 
and  marshaling  all  for  a  victory  in  good  and  blessing; 
fashioning  in  beauty,  composing  in  spiritual  order,  and  so 
gathering  in  the  immense  populations  of  the  worlds,  to  be 
one  realm — angels,  archangels,  seraphim,  thrones,  domin- 
ions, principalities,  powers,  and  saints  of  mankind — all  to 
find,  in  his  works  of  guidance  and  new-creating  grace;,  a 
volume  of  wisdom,  which  it  will  be  the  riches  of  their 
eternity  to  study. 

Thus  we  conceive,  alas!  too  feebly,  the  true  scale  of  dig- 
nity in  God's  two  realms.  In  one  the  order  is  superficial 
and  palpable.  In  the  other  it  is  deep  as  eternity,  mysteri- 
ous and  vast  as  the  counsel  that  comprehends  eternitv,  in 
its  development.  Still  it  is  counsel,  it  is  order,  it  is  truth 


NOT    THOSE    OF    SCIENCE.  275 

and  reason.  Even  as  the  Eevelation  of  John  contrives,  in 
so  many  ways,  to  intimate,  by  the  using  of  exact  numbers 
for  those  which  are  not;  in  the  seven  angels,  and  seven 
trumpets,  and  seven  vials;  in  the  four  beasts,  and  four  and 
twenty  elders ;  in  the  hundred,  forty,  and  four  thousand  of 
them  that  are  sealed ;  in  the  city,  the  new  Jerusalem,  that 
is  forursquare,  having  its  hight,  length,  and  breadth  equal ; 
with  twelve  gates,  tended  by  twelve  angels,  resting  on 
twelve  foundations,  that  are  twelve  manner  of  precious 
stones — by  such  images,  and  under  such  exact  notations 
of  arithmetic,  does  this  man  of  vision  put  us  on  conceiv- 
ing, as  we  best  can,  the  glorious  and  exact  society  God  is 
reconstructing  out  of  the  fallen  powers.  We  shall  see  it 
to  be  all  in  law;  settled  in  such  terms  of  order,  that  all 
counsel,  act,  and  joy,  both  his  and  ours,  will  be  in  terms 
of  everlasting  truth  and  reason,  a  realm  as  much  more 
wonderful  than  nature,  as  liberties  of  mind  are  more  diffi- 
cult to  master  than  material  quantities. 


CHAPTER   X. 

THE   CHARACTER  OF  JESUS  FORBIDS   HIS  POSSIBLE 
CLASSIFICATION   WITH   MEN. 

THE  need  of  a  supernatural,  divine  ministration,  to 
restore  the  disorders  of  sin,  is  now  shown ;  also  that  such 
a  ministration  is  compatible  with  the  order  of  nature,  and, 
being  in  that  view  a  rational  possibility,  that  it  may  well 
be  assumed  as  a  probable  expectation.  In  this  manner 
we  are  brought  directly  up  to  confront  the  main  question — 
Is  the  exigency  met  by  the  fact  ?  is  the  supernatural  divine 
ministration  actually  set  up,  and  shown  to  be  by  adequate 
evidence  ? 

Here  we  raise  a  question,  for  the  first  time,  that  puts 
the  Christian  scriptures  in  issue ;  for  it  is  the  grand  pecu- 
liarity of  these  sacred  writings,  that  they  deal  in  super- 
natural events  and  transactions,  and  show  the  fact  of  a 
celestial  institution  finally  erected  on  earth,  in  the  person 
of  Jesus  Christ,  which  is  called  the  kingdom  of  God  or 
of  heaven,  and  is  in  fact  a  perpetual,  supernatural  dispens- 
atory of  healing  and  salvation  for  the  race.  Christianity 
is,  in  this  view,  no  mere  scheme  of  doctrine,  or  of  ethical 
practice,  but  is  instead  a  kind  of  miracle,  a  power  out  of 
nature  and  above,  descending  into  it ;  a  historically  super- 
natural movement  on  the  world,  that  is  visibly  entered 
into  it,  and  organized  to  be  an  institution  in  the  person  of 
Jesus  Christ.  He  therefore  is  the  central  figure  and 
power,  and  with  him  the  entire  fabric  either  stands  or 
falls. 

To  this  central  figure,  then,  we  now  turn  ourselves; 


THE'  GOSPEL    HISTORY,    HOW    USED. 

and,  as  no  proof  beside  the  light  is  necessary  to  show 
the  sun  shines,  so  we  shall  find  that  Jesus  proves  himself 
by  his  own  self-evidence.  The  simple  inspection  of  his 
life  and  character  will  suffice  to  show  that  he  can  not  be 
classified  with  mankind,  (man  though  he  be,)  any  more 
than  what  we  call  his  miracles  can  be  classified  with  mere 
natural  events.  The  simple-  demonstrations  of  his  life 
and  spirit  are  the  sufficient  attestation  of  his  own  profes- 
sion, when  he  says — "  I  am  from  above" — "  I  came  down 
from  heaven." 

Let  us  not  be  misunderstood.  We  do  not  assume  the 
truth  of  the  narrative  by  which  the  manner  and  facts  of 
the  life  of  Jesus  are  reported  to  us ;  for  this,  by  the  sup- 
position, is  the  matter  in  question.  We  only  assume  the 
representations  themselves,  as  being  just  what  they  are, 
and  discover  their  necessary  truth  in  the  transcendent, 
wondrously  self-evident  picture  of  divine  excellence  and 
beauty  presented  in  them.  We  take  up  the  account  of 
Christ,  in  the  New  Testament,  just  as  we  would  any  other 
ancient  writing,  or  as  if  it  were  a  manuscript  just  brought 
to  light  in  some  ancient  library.  We  open  the  book,  and 
discover  in  it  four  distinct  biographies  of  a  certain  remark- 
able character,  called  Jesus  Christ.  He  is  miraculously 
born  of  Mary,  a  virgin  of  Galilee,  and  declares,  himself, 
without  scruple,  that  he  came  out  from  God.  Finding 
the  supposed  history  made  up,  in  great  part,  of  his  mighty 
acts,  and  not  being  disposed  to  believe  in  miracles  and 
marvels,  we  should  soon  dismiss  the  book  as  a  tissue  of 
absurdities  too  extravagant  for  belief,  were  we  not  struck 
with  the  sense  of  something  very  peculiar  in  the  character 
of  this  remarkable  person.  Having  our  attention  arrested 
thus  by  the  impression  made  on  our  respect,  we  are  put 

24 


278  THE    LIFE    OF    JESUS    BEGINS 

on  inquiry,  and  the  more  we  study  it  the  more  wonder- 
fill,  as  a  character,  it  appears.  And  before  we  have  done, 
it  becomes,  in  fact,  the  chief  wonder  of  the  story ;  lifting 
all  the  other  wonders  into  order  and  intelligent  proportion 
round  it,  and  making  one  compact  and  glorious  wonder 
of  the  whole  picture — a  picture  shining  in  its  own  clear 
sunlight  upon  us,  as  the  truest  of  all  truths — Jesus,  the 
Divine  Word,  coming  out  from  God,  to  be  incarnate  with 
us,  and  be  the  vehicle  of  God  and  salvation  to  the  race. 

On  the  single  question,  therefore,  of  the  more  than 
human  character  of  Jesus,  we  propose,  in  perfect  confi- 
dence, to  rest  a  principal  argument  for  Christianity  as  a 
supernatural  institution ;  for,  if  there  be  in  Jesus  a  char- 
acter which  is  not  human,  then  has  something  broken  into 
the  world  that  is  not  of  it,  and  the  spell  of  unbelief  is 
broken. 

Not  that  Christianity  might  not  be  a  supernatural  insti- 
tution, if  Jesus  were  only  a  man ;  for  many  prophets  and 
holy  men,  as  we  believe,  have  brought  forth  to  the  world 
communications  that  are  not  from  themselves,  but  were 
received  by  inspirations  from  God.  There  are  several 
grades,  too,  of  the  supernatural,  as  already  intimated; 
the  supernatural  human,  the  supernatural  prophetic,  the 
supernatural  demonic  and  angelic,  the  supernatural  divine. 
Christ,  we  shall  see,  is  the  supernatural  manifested  in  the 
highest  grade  or  order ;  viz.,  the  divine. 

We  observe,  then,  as  a  firbt  peculiarity  at  the  root  of 
his  character,  that  he  begins  life  with  a  perfect  youth. 
His  childhood  is  an  unspotted,  and,  withal,  a  kind  of  ce- 
lestial flower.  The  notion  of  a  superhuman  or  celestial 
childhood,  the  most  difficult  of  all  things  to  be  conceived, 


WJTH    A    PERFECT    CHILDHOOD.  279 

is  yet  successfully  drawn  by  a  few  simple  touches.  He 
is  announced  beforehand  as  "that  Holy  Thing;"  a  beau- 
tiful and  powerful  stroke  to  raise  our  expectation  to  the 
level  of  a  nature  so  mysterious.  In  his  childhood,  every- 
body loves  him.  Using  words  of  external  description,  he 
is  shown  growing  up  in  favor  with  God  and  man,  a  child 
so  lovely  and  beautiful  that  heaven  and  earth  appear  to 
smile  upon  him  together.  So,  when  it  is  added  that  the 
child  grew  and  waxed  strong  in  spirit,  filled  with  wisdom, 
and,  more  than  all,  that  the  grace  or  beautifying  power  of 
God  was  upon  him,  we  look,  as  on  the  unfolding  of  a 
sacred  flower,  and  seem  to  scent  a  fragrance  wafted  on  us 
from  other  worlds.  Then,  at  the  age  of  twelve,  he  is 
found  among  the  great  learned  men  of  the  day,  the  doc- 
tors of  the  temple,  hearing  what  they  say  and  asking 
them  questions.  And  this,  without  any  word  that  indi- 
cates forwardness  or  pertness  in  the  child's  manner,  such 
as  some  Christian  Rabbi,  or  silly  and  credulous  devotee, 
would  certainly  have  added.  The  doctors  are  not  offended, 
as  by  a  child  too  forward  or  wanting  in  modesty,  they  are 
only  amazed  that  such  a  degree  of  understanding  can 
dwell  in  one  so  young  and  simple.  His  mother  finds  him 
there  among  them,  and  begins  to  expostulate  with  him. 
Bis  reply  is  very  strange  ;  it  must,  she  is  sure,  have  some 
deep  meaning  that  corresponds  with  his  mysterious  birth, 
and  the  sense  he  has  ever  given  her  of  a  something 
strangely  peculiar  in  his  ways ;  and  she  goes  home  keep- 
ing his  saying  in  her  heart,  and  guessing  vainly  what  his 
thought  may  be.  Mysterious,  holy  secret,  which  this 
mother  hides  in  her  bosom,  that  her  holy  thing,  her  child 
whom  she  has  watched,  during  the  twelve  years  of  his 
celestial  childhood,  now  begins  to  speak  of  being  "  about 


280  HIS    PEEFECT    CHILDHOOD 

his  Father's  business,"  in  words  of  dark  enigma,  which 
she  can  not  fathom. 
Now  we  do  not  say,  observe,  that  there  is  one  word  of 

«/  /  • 

truth  in  these  touches  of  narration.  We  only  say  that, 
whether  they  be  fact  or  fiction,  here  is  given  the  sketch 
of  a  perfect  and  sacred  childhood — not  of  a  simple,  lovely, 
ingenuous,  and  properly  human  childhood,  such  as  the 
poets  love  to  sketch — but  of  a  sacred  and  celestial  child- 
hood. In  this  respect,  the  early  character  of  Jesus  is  a 
picture  that  stands  by  itself.  In  no  other  case,  that  we 
remember,  has  it  ever  entered  the  mind  of  a  biographer, 
in  drawing  a  character,  to  represent  it  as  beginning  with 
a  spotless  childhood.  The  childhood  of  the  great  human 
characters,  if  given  at  all,  is  commonly  represented,  ac- 
cording to  the  uniform  truth,  as  being  more  or  less  con- 
trary to  the  manner  of  their  mature  age ;  and  never  as 
being  strictly  one  with  it,  except  in  those  cases  of  inferior 
eminence  where  the  kind  of  distinction  attained  to  is  that 
of  some  mere  prodigy,  and  not  a  character  of  greatness 
in  action,  or  of  moral  excellence.  In  all  the  higher 
ranges  of  character,  the  excellence  portrayed  is  never  the 
simple  unfolding  of  a  harmonious  and  perfect  beauty 
contained  in  the  germ  of  childhood,  but  it  is  a  character 
formed  by  a  process  of  rectification,  in  which  many  follies 
are  mended  and  distempers  removed ;  in  which  confidence 
is  checked  by  defeat,  passion  moderated  by  reason,  smart- 
ness sobered  by  experience.  Commonly  a  certain  pleas- 
ure is  taken  in  showing  how  the  many  wayward  sallies 
of  the  boy  are,  at  length,  reduced  by  discipline  to  the  char- 
acter of  wisdom,  justice,  and  public  heroism  so  much 
admired. 

Besides,  if  any  writer,  of  almost  any  age,  will  under- 


GENUINELY    DESCRIBED.  281 

take  to  describe,  not  merely  a  spotless,  but  a  superhuman 
or  celestial  childhood,  not  having  the  reality  before  him, 
he  must  be  somewhat  more  than  human  himself,  if  he 
does  not  pile  together  a  mass  of  clumsy  exaggerations, 
and  draw  and  overdraw,  till  neither  heaven  nor  earth 
can  find  any  verisimilitude  in  the  picture. 

Neither  let  us  omit  to  notice  what  ideas  the  Rabbis  and 
learned  doctors  of  this  age  were  able,  in  fact,  to  furnish, 
when  setting  forth  a  remarkable  childhood.     Thus  Jose- 
phus,  drawing  on  the  teachings  of  the  Rabbis,  tells  how 
the  infant  Moses,  when  the  king  of  Egypt  took  him  out 
of  his  daughter's  arms,  and  playfully  put  the  diadem  on 
his  head,  threw  it  pettishly  down   and  stamped   on   it. 
And  when  Moses  was  three  years  old,  he  tells  us  that  the 
child  had  grown  so  tall,  and  exhibited  such  a  wonderful 
beauty  of  countenance,  that  people  were  obliged,  as  it 
were,  to  stop  and  look  at  him  as  he  was  carried  along  the 
road,  and  were  held  fast  by  the  wonder,  gazing  till  he  was 
out  of  sight.     See,  too,  what  work  is  made  of  the  child- 
hood of  Jesus  himself,  in  the  Apocryphal  gospels.     These 
are  written  by  men  of  so  nearly  the  same  era,  that  we 
may  discover,  in  their  embellishments,  what  kind  of  a 
childhood  it  was  in  the  mere  invention  of  the  time  to 
make  out.     While  the  gospels  explicitly  say  that  Jesus 
wrought  no  miracles  till  his  public  ministry  began,  and 
that  he  made  his  beginning  in  the  miracle  of  Cana,  these 
are  ambitious  to  make  him  a  great  prodigy  in  his  child- 
hood.    They  tell  how,  on  one  occasion,  he  pursued,  in 
his  anger,  the  other  children,  who  refused  to  play  with 
him,  and  turned  them  into  kids;  how,  on  another,  when 
a  child  accidentally  ran  against  him,  he  was  angry,  and 
killed  him  by  his  mere  word ;  how,  on  another,  Jesus  had 


282  DISTINGUISHED    FROM    MEN 

a  dispute  with  his  teacher  over  the  alphabet,  and  when 
the  teacher  struck  him,  how  he  crushed  him,  withered  his 
arm,  and  threw  him  down  dead.  Finally,  Joseph  tells 
Mary  that  they  must  keep  him  within  doors ;  for  every 
body  perishes  against  whom  he  is  excited.  His  mother 
sends  him  to  the  well  for  water,  and,  having  broken  his 
pitcher,  he  brings  the  water  in  his  cloak.  He  goes  into  a 
dyer's  shop,  when  the  dyer  is  out,  and  throws  all  the 
cloths  he  finds  into  a  vat  of  one  color,  but,  when  they  are 
taken  out,  behold,  they  are  all  dyed  of  the  precise  color 
that  was  ordered.  He  commands  a  palm-tree  to  stoop 
down  and  let  him  pluck  the  fruit,  and  it  obeys.  When 
he  is  carried  down  into  Egypt,  all  the  idols  fall  down 
wherever  he  passes,  and  the  lions  and  leopards  gather 
round  him  in  a  harmless  company.  This  the  Gospel  of 
the  Infancy  gives,  as  a  picture  of  the  wonderful  childhood 
of  Jesus.  How  unlike  that  holy  flower  of  paradise,  in 
the  true  gospels,  which  a  few  simple  touches  make  to 
bloom  in  beautiful  self-evidence  before  us ! 

Passing  now  to  the  character  of  Jesus  in  his  maturity, 
we  discover,  at  once,  that  there  is  an  element  in  it  which 
distinguishes  it  from  all  human  characters,  viz.,  innocence. 
By  this  we  mean,  not  that  he  is  actually  sinless ;  that  will 
be  denied,  and  therefore  must  not  here  be  assumed.  We 
mean  that,  viewed  externally,  he  is  a  perfectly  harmless 
being,  actuated  by  no  destructive  passions,  gentle  to  infe- 
riors, doing  ill  or  injury  to  none.  The  figure  of  a  Lamb, 
which  never  was,  or  could  be,  applied  to  any  of  the  great 
human  characters,  without  an  implication  of  weakness 
fatal  to  all  respect,  is  yet,  with  no  such  effect,  applied  to 
him.  We  associate  weakness  with  innocence,  and  the 


BY    HIS     INNOCENCE.  283 

association  is  so  powerful,  that  no  human  writer  would 
undertake  to  sketch  a  great  character  on  the  basis  of  inno- 
cence, or  would  even  think  it  possible.  We  predicate 
innocence  of  infancy,  but  to  be  a  perfectly  harmless,  guile- 
less man,  never  doing  ill  even  for  a  moment,  we  consider 
to  be  the  same  as  to  be  a  man  destitute  of  spirit  and 
manly  force.  But  Christ  accomplished  the  impossible. 
Appearing  in  all  the  grandeur  and  majesty  of  a  superhu- 
man manhood,  he  is  able  still  to  unite  the  impression  of 
innocence,  with  no  apparent  diminution  of  his  sublimity. 
It  is,  in  fact,  the  distinctive  glory  of  his  character,  that  it 
seems  to  be  the  natural  unfolding  of  a  divine  innocence-, 
a  pure  celestial  childhood,  amplified  by  growth.  We  feel 
the  power  of  this  strange  combination,  but  we  have  so 
great  difficulty  in  conceiving  it,  or  holding  our  minds  to 
the  conception,  that  we  sometimes  subside  or  descend  to 
the  human  level,  and  empty  the  character  of  Jesus  of  the 
strange  element  unawares.  We  read,  for  example,  his 
terrible  denunciations  against  the  Pharisees,  and  are 
shocked  by  the  violent,  fierce  sound  they  have  on  our 
mortal  lips ;  not  perceiving  that  the  offense  is  in  us,  and 
not  in  him.  We  should  suffer  no  such  revulsion,  did  we 
only  conceive  them  bursting  out,  as  words  of  indignant 
grief,  from  the  surcharged  bosom  of  innocence ;  for  there 
is  nothing  so  bitter  as  the  offense  that  innocence  feels, 
when  stung  by  hypocrisy  and  a  sense  of  cruelty  to  the 
poor.  So,  when  he  drives  the  money-changers  from  the 
temple,  we  are  likely  to  leave  out  the  only  element  that 
saves  him  from  a  look  of  violence  and  passion.  Whereas 
it  is  the  very  point  of  the  story,  not  that  he,  as  by  mere 
force,  can  drive  so  many  men,  but  that  so  many  are  seen 
retiring  before  the  moral  power  of  one — a  mysterious 


284  HIS    RELIGIOUS    CHARACTER 

being,  in  whose  face  and  form  the  indignant  flush  of  inno- 
cence reveals  a  tremendous  feeling,  they  can  no  wise  com- 
prehend, much  less  are  able  to  resist. 

Accustomed  to  no  such  demonstrations  of  vigor  and 
decision  in  the  innocent  human  characters,  and  having  it 
as  our  way  to  set  them  down,  without  farther  considera- 
tion, as 

"  Incapable  and  shallow  innocents," — 

we  turn  the  indignant  fire  of  Jesus  into  a  fire  of  malig- 
nity ;  whereas  it  should  rather  be  conceived  that  Jesus  here 
reveals  his  divinity,  by  what  so  powerfully  distinguishes 
God  himself,  when  he  clothes  his  goodness  in  the  tempests 
and  thunders  of  nature.  Decisive,  great,  and  strong, 
Christ  is  yet  all  this,  even  the  more  sublimely,  that  he 
is  invested,  withal,  in  the  lovely,  but  humanly  feeble 
garb  of  innocence.  And  that  this  is  the  true  conception, 
is  clear,  in  the  fact  that  no  one  ever  thinks  of  him  as 
weak,  and  no  one  fails  to  be  somehow  impressed  with  a 
sense  of  innocence  by  his  life;  when  his  enemies  are 
called  to  show  what  evil  or  harm  he  hath  done,  they  can 
specify  nothing,  save  that  he  has  offended  their  bigotry. 
Even  Pilate,  when  he  gives  him  up,  confesses  that  he 
finds  nothing  in  him  to  blame,  and,  shuddering  with  ap- 
prehensions he  can  not  subdue,  washes  his  hands  to  be 
clear  of  the  innocent  blood !  Thus  he  dies,  a  being  holy, 
harmless,  undefiled.  And  when  he  hangs,  a  bruised 
flower  drooping  on  his  cross,  and  the  sun  above  is  dark, 
and  the  earth  beneath  shudders  with  pain,  what  have  we 
in  this  funeral  grief  of  the  worlds,  but  a  fit  honor  paid 
to  the  sad  majesty  of  his  divine  innocence. 

We  pass  now  to  his  religious  character,  which,  we  shall 


IS    WITHOUT    REPENTANCE.  285 

discover,  has  the  remarkable  distinction  that  it  proceeds 
from  a  point  exactly  opposite  to  that  which  is  the  root,  or 
radical  element  in  the  religious  character  of  men.  Human 
piety  begins  with  repentance.  It  is  the  effort  of  a  being, 
implicated  in  wrong  and  writhing  under  the  stings  of 
guilt,  to  come  unto  God.  The  most  righteous,  or  even 
self-righteous,  men  blend  expressions  of  sorrow  and  vows 
of  new  obedience  with  their  exercises.  But  Christ,  in  the 
character  given  him,  never  acknowledges  sin.  It  is  the 
grand  peculiarity  of  his  piety,  that  he  never  regrets  any 
thing  that  he  has  done  or  been;  expresses,  nowhere,  a 
single  feeling  of  compunction,  or  the  least  sense  of  un- 
worthiness.  On  the  contrary,  he  boldly  challenges  his 
accusers,  in  the  question — Which  of  you  convinceth  me 
of  sin  ?  and  even  declares,  at  the  close  of  his  life,  in  a 
solemn  appeal  to  God,  that  he  has  given  to  men,  unsullied, 
the  glory  divine  that  was  deposited  in  him. 

Now  the  question  is  not  whether  Christ  was,  in  fact, 
the  faultless  being,  assumed,  in  his  religious  character.  All 
we  have  to  notice  here  is  that  he  makes  the  assumption, 
makes  it  not  only  in  words,  but  in  the  very  tenor  of  his 
exercises  themselves,  and  that  by  this  fact  his  piety  is 
radically  distinguished  from  all  human  piety.  And  no 
mere  human  creature,  it  is  certain,  could  hold  such  a 
religious  attitude,  without  shortly  displaying  faults  that 
would  cover  him  with  derision,  or  excesses  and  delinquen- 
cies that  would  even  disgust  his  friends.  Piety  without 
one  dash  of  repentance,  one  ingenuous  confession  of 
wrong,  one  tear,  one  look  of  contrition,  one  request  to 
heaven  for  pardon — let  any  one  of  mankind  try  this  kind 
of  piety,  and  see  how  long  it  will  be  ere  his  righteousness 
will  prove  itself  to  be  the  most  impudent  conceit !  how 


286  HE    UNITES    OPPOSITES, 

long  before  his  passions,-  sobered  by  no  contrition,  his 
pride  kept  down  by  no  repentance,  will  tempt  him  into 
absurdities  that  will  turn  his  pretenses  to  mockery !  No 
sooner  does  any  one  of  us  begin  to  be  self-righteous,  than 
he  begins  to  fall  into  outward  sins  that  shame  his  conceit. 
But,  in  the  case  of  Jesus,  no  such  disaster  follows.  Begin- 
ning with  an  impenitent,  or  unrepentant  piety,  he  holds  it 
to  the  end,  and  brings  no  visible  stain  upon  it. 

Now,  one  of  two  things  must  be  true.  He  was  either 
sinless,  or  he  was  not.  If  sinless,  what  greater,  more  pal- 
pable exception  to  the  law  of  human  development,  than 
that  a  perfect  and  stainless  being  has  for  once  lived  in  the 
flesh !  If  not,  which  is  the  supposition  required  of  those 
who  deny  every  thing  above  the  range  of  human  devel- 
opment, then  we  have  a  man  taking  up  a  religion  without 
repentance,  a  religion  not  human,  but  celestial,  a  style  of 
piety  never  taught  him  in  his  childhood,  and  never  con- 
ceived or  attempted  among  men — more  than  this,  a  style 
of  piety,  withal,  wholly  unsuited  to  his  real  character  as 
a  sinner,  holding  it  as  a  figment  of  insufferable  presump- 
tion to  the  end  of  life,  and  that  in  a  way  of  such  unfalter- 
ing grace  and  beauty,  as  to  command  the  universal  hom- 
age of  the  human  race !  Could  there  be  a  wider  deviation 
from  all  we  know  of  mere  human  development  ? 

He  was  also  able  perfectly  to  unite  elements  of  charac- 
ter, that  others  find  the  greatest  difficulty  in  uniting,  how- 
ever unevenly  and  partially.  He  is  never  said  to  have 
smiled,  and  yet  he  never  produces  the  impression  of  aus- 
terity, moroseness,  sadness,  or  even  of  being  unhappy. 
On  the  contrary,  he  is  described  as  one  that  appears  to  be 
commonly  filled  with  a  sacred  joy;  "rejoicing  in  spirit," 


AS    NO    HUMAN    SAINT    EVER    DOES.          287 

and  leaving  to  his  disciples,  in  the  hour  of  his  departure, 
the  bequest  of  his  joy — "that  they  might  have  my  joy 
fulfilled  in  themselves."  We  could  not  long  endure  a 
human  being  whose  face  was  never  moved  by  laughter, 
or  relaxed  by  a  gladdening  smile.  What  sympathy  could 
we  have  with  one  who  appears,  in  this  manner,  to  have 
no  human  heart  ?  We  could  not  even  trust  him.  And 
yet  we  have  sympathy  with  Christ;  for  there  is  some- 
where in  him  an  ocean  of  deep  joy,  and  we  see  that  he  is, 
in  fact,  only  burdened  with  his  sympathy  for  us  to  such  a 
degree,  that  his  mighty  life  is  overcast  and  oppressed  by 
the  charge  he  has  undertaken.  His  lot  is  the  lot  of  pri- 
vation, he  has  no  powerful  friends,  he  has  not  even  where 
to  lay  his  head.  No  human  being  could  appear  in  such  a 
guise,  without  occupying  us  much  with  the  sense  of  his 
affliction.  We  should  be  descending  to  him,  as  it  were, 
in  pity.  But  we  never  pity  Christ,  never  think  of  him 
as  struggling  with  the  disadvantages  of  a  lower  level,  to 
rise  above  it.  In  fact,  he  does  not  allow  us,  after  all,  to 
think  much  of  his  privations.  We  think  of  him  more  as 
a  being  of  mighty  resources,  proving  himself,  only  the 
more  sublimely,  that  he  is  in  the  guise  of  destitution. 
He  is  the  most  unworldly  of  beings,  having  no  desire  at 
all  for  what  the  earth  can  give,  impossible  to  be  caught 
with  any  longing  for  its  benefits,  impassible  even  to  its 
charms,  and  yet  there  is  no  ascetic  sourness  or  repugnance, 
no  misanthropic  distaste  in  his  manner;  as  if  he  were 
bracing  himself  against  the  world  to  keep  it  off.  The 
more  closely  he  is  drawn  to  other  worlds,  the  more  fresh 
and  susceptible  is  he  to  the  humanities  of  this.  The  little 
child  is  an  image  of  gladness,  which  his  heart  leaps  forth 
to  embrace.  The  wedding  and  the  feast  and  the  funera* 


288  HIS    ASTONISHING    PRETENSIONS 

have  all  their  cord  of  sympathy  in  his  bosom.  At  the 
wedding  he  is  clothed  in  congratulation,  at  the  feast  in 
doctrine,  at  the  funeral  in  tears ;  but  no  miser  was  ever 
drawn  to  his  money,  with  a  stronger  desire,  than -he  to 
worlds  above  the  world.  Men  undertake  to  be  spiritual, 
and  they  become  ascetic  ;  or,  endeavoring  to  hold  a  liberal 
view  of  the  comforts  and  pleasures  of  society,  they  are 
soon  buried  in  the  world,  and  slaves  to  its  fashions;  or, 
holding  a  scrupulous  watch  to  keep  out  every  particular 
sin,  they  become  legal,  and  fall  out  of  liberty ;  or,  charmed 
with  the  noble  and  heavenly  liberty,  they  run  to  negli- 
gence and  irresponsible  living;  so  the  earnest  become 
violent,  the  fervent  fanatical  and  censorious,  the  gentle 
waver,  the  firm  turn  bigots,  the  liberal  grow  lax,  the  be- 
nevolent ostentatious.  Poor  human  infirmity  can  hold 
nothing  steady.  Where  the  pivot  of  righteousness  is 
broken,  the  scales  must  needs  slide  off  their  balance. 
Indeed,  it  is  one  of  the  most  difficult  things  which  a  cul- 
tivated Christian  can  attempt,  only  to  sketch  a  theoretic 
view  of  character,  in  its  true  justness  and  proportion,  so 
that  a  little  more  study,  or  a  little  more  self-experience, 
will  not  require  him  to  modify  it.  And  yet  the  character 
of  Christ  is  never  modified,  even  by  a  shade  of  rectifica- 
tion. It  is  one  and  the  same  throughout.  He  makes  no 
improvements,  prunes  no  extravagances,  returns  from  no 
eccentricities.  The  balance  of  his  character  is  never  dis- 
turbed, or  readjusted,  and  the  astounding  assumption  on 
which  it  is  based  is  never  shaken,  even  by  a  suspicion 
that  he  falters  in  it. 

There  is  yet  another  point  related  to  this,  in  which  the 
attitude  of  Jesus  is  even  more  distinct  from  any  that  was 


ARE    FULLY    SUPPORTED.  2£9 

ever  taken  by  man,  and  is  yet  triumphantly  sustained.  I 
speak  of  the  astonishing  pretensions  asserted  concerning 
his  person.  Similar  pretensions  have  sometimes  been  as- 
sumed by  maniacs,  or  insane  persons,  but  never,  so  far  as 
I  know,  by  persons  in  the  proper  exercise  of  their  reason. 
Certain  it  is  that  no  mere  man  could  take  the  same  atti- 
tude of  supremacy  toward  the  race,  and  inherent  affinity  or 
oneness  with  God,  without  fatally  shocking  the  confidence 
of  the  world  by  his  effrontery.  Imagine  a  human  crea- 
ture saying  to  the  world — "I  came  forth  from  the  Father" 
— "ye  are  from  beneath,  I  am  from  above;"  facing  all  the 
intelligence  and  even  the  philosophy  of  the  world,  and 
saying,  in  bold  assurance — "behold,  a  greater  than  Solo- 
mon is  here" — "  I  am  the  light  of  the  world" — "  the  way, 
the  truth,  and  the  life ;"  publishing  to  all  peoples  and  re- 
ligions— "  No  man  cometh  to  the  Father,  but  by  me ;" 
promising  openly  in  his  death — "I  will  draw  all  men 
unto  me ;"  addressing  the  Infinite  Majesty,  and"  testifying 
— "I  have  glorified  thee  on  the  earth;"  calling  to  the 
human  race — "Come  unto  me,"  "follow  me;"  laying  his 
hand  upon  all  the  dearest  and  most  intimate  affections  of 
life,  and  demanding  a  precedent  love — "he  that  loveth 
father  or  mother  more  than  me,  is  not  worthy  of  me." 
Was  there  ever  displayed  an  example  of  effrontery  and 
spiritual  conceit  so  preposterous  ?  Was  there  ever  a  man 
that  dared  put  himself  on  the  world  in  such  pretensions  ? 
— as  if  all  light  was  in  him,  as  if  to  follow  him  and  be 
worthy  of  him  was  to  be  the  conclusive  or  chief  excel- 
lence of  mankind !  What  but  mockery  and  disgust  does 
he  challenge  as  the  certain  reward  of  his  audacity !  But 
no  one  is  offended  with  Jesus  on  this  account,  and  what 
is  a  sure  test  of  his  success,  it  is  remarkable  that,  of  all 

25 


290     HIS  ASTONISHING  PEETENSIONS 

the  readers  of  the  gospel,  it  probably  never  even  occurs 
to  one  in  a  hundred  thousand,  to  blame  his  conceit,  or 
the  egregious  vanity  of  his  pretensions.  ^ 

ISTor  is  there  any  thing  disputable  in  these  pretensions, 
least  of  all,  any  trace  of  myth  or  fabulous  tradition. 
They  enter  into  the  very  web  of  his  ministry,  so  that  if 
they  are  extracted  and  nothing  left  transcending  mere  hu- 
manity, nothing  at  all  is  left.  Indeed  there  is  a  tacit  as- 
sumption, continually  maintained,  that  far  exceeds  the 
range  of  these  formal  pretensions.  He  says — "I  and  the 
Father  that  sent  me."  What  figure  would  a  man  present 
in  such  language — I  and  the  Father?  He  goes  even  be- 
yond this,  and  apparently  without  any  thought  of  excess 
or  presumption,  classing  himself  with  the  infinite  Majesty 
in  a  common  plural,  he  says — "  We  will  come  unto  him, 
and  make  our  abode  with  him."  Imagine  any,  the  great- 
est and  holiest  of  mankind,  any  prophet,  or  apostle,  saying 
we,  of  himself  and  the  Great  Jehovah  1  What  a  concep- 
tion did  he  give  us  concerning  himself,  when  he  assumed 
the  necessity  of  such  information  as  this — "my  Father  is 
greater  than  I;"  and  above  all,  when  he  calls  himself,  as 
he  often  does,  in  a  tone  of  condescension — "the  Son  of 
Man."  See  him  also  on  the  top  of  Olivet,  looking  down 
on  the  guilty  city  and  weeping  words  of  compassion  like 
these — imagine  some  man  weeping  over  London  or  New 
York,  in  the  like — "How  often  would  I  have  gathered 
thy  children  together  as  a  hen  doth  gather  her  chickens 
under  her  wings,  and  ye  would  not!"  See  him  also  in  the 
supper,  instituting  a  rite  of  remembrance  for  himself,  a 
scorned,  outcast  man,  and  saying — "this  is  my  body" — 
"this  do  in  remembrance  of  me." 

I  have  dwelt  thus  on  the  transcendent  pretensions  of 


ABE    FULLY    SUPPORTED.  291 

Jesus,  because  there  is  an  argument  here  for  his  superhu- 
manity,  which  can  not  be  resisted.     For  eighteen  hundred 
years,  these  prodigious  assumptions  have  been  published 
and  preached  to  a  world  that  is  quick  to  lay  hold  of  con- 
ceit, and  bring  down  the  lofty  airs  of  pretenders,  and  yet, 
during  all  this  time,  whole  nations  of  people,  composing 
as  well  the  learned  and  powerful  as  the  ignorant  and  hum- 
ble, have  paid  their  homage  to  the  name  of  Jesus,  detect- 
ing never  any  disagreement  between  his  merits  and  his 
pretensions,  offended  never  by  any  thought  of  his  extrav- 
agance.   In  which  we  have  absolute  proof  that  he  practi- 
cally maintains  his  amazing  assumptions !     Indeed  it  will 
even  be  found  that,  in  the  common  apprehension  of  the 
race,  he  maintains  the  merit  of  a  most  peculiar  modesty, 
producing  no  conviction  more  distinctly,  than  that  of  his 
intense  lowliness  and  humility.     His  worth  is  seen  to  be 
so  great,  his  authority  so  high,  his  spirit  so  celestial,  that 
instead  of  being  offended  by  his  pretensions,  we  take  the 
impression,  of  one  in  whom  it  is  even  a  condescension  to 
breathe  our  air.     I  say  not  that  his  friends  and  followers 
take  this  impression,  it  is  received  as  naturally  and  irre- 
sistibly by  unbelievers.     I  do  not  recollect  any  skeptic,  or 
infidel  who  has  even  thought  to  accuse  him  as  a  conceited 
person,  or  to  assault  him  in  this,  the  weakest  and  absurd- 
est,  if  not  the  strongest  and  holiest,  point  of  his  character. 
Come  now,  all  ye  that  tell  us  in  your  wisdom  of  the 
mere  natural  humanity  of  Jesus,  and  help  us  to  find  how 
it  is,  that  he  is  only  a  natural  development  of  the  human ; 
select  your  best  and  wisest  character;  take  the  range,  if 
you  will,  of  all  the  great  philosophers  and  saints,  and 
choose  out  one  that  is  most  competent ;  or  if,  perchance, 
some  one  of  you  may  imagine  that  he  is  himself  about 


292  HE    EXCELS    IN    THE    PASSIVE, 

upon  a  level  with  Jesus,  (as  we  hear  that  some  of  you  do,) 
let  him  come  forward  in  this  trial  and  say — "follow  me" — 
"be  worthy  of  me" — "I  am  the  light  of  the  world" — "ye 
are  from  beneath,  I  am  from  above" — "behold  a  greater 
than  Solomon  is  here ;"  take  on  all  these  transcendent  as- 
sumptions, and  see  how  soon  your  glory  will  be  sifted  out 
of  you  by  the  detective  gaze,  and  darkened  by  the  con- 
tempt of  mankind!  Why  not;  is  not  the  challenge  fair? 
Do  you  not  tell  us  that  you  can  say  as  divine  things  as 
he?  Is  it  not  in  you  too,  of  course,  to  do  what  is  human? 
are  you  not  in  the  front  rank  of  human  developments?  do 
you  not  rejoice  in  the  power  to  rectify  many  mistakes 
and  errors  in  the  words  of  Jesus?  Give  us  then  this  one 
experiment,  and  see  if  it  does  not  prove  to  you  a  truth  that 
is  of  some  consequence;  viz.,  that  you  are  a  man,  and 
that  Jesus  Christ  is — more. 

But  there  is  also  a  passive  side  to  the  character  of  Je- 
sus, which  is  equally  peculiar  and  which  also  demands 
our  attention.  I  recollect  no  really  great  character  in  his- 
tory, excepting  such  as  may  have  been  formed  under 
Christianity,  that  can  properly  be  said  to  have  united  the 
passive  virtues,  or  to  have  considered  them  any  essential 
part  of  a  finished  character.  Socrates  comes  the  nearest 
to  such  an  impression,  and  therefore  most  resembles  Christ 
in  the  submissiveness  of  his  death.  It  does  not  appear, 
however,  that  his  mind  had  taken  this  turn  previously  to 
his  trial,  and  the  submission  he  makes  to  the  public  sen- 
tence is,  in  fact,  a  refusal  only  to  escape  from  the  prison 
surreptitiously;  which  he  does,  partly  because  he  thinks 
it  the  duty  of  every  good  citizen  not  to  break  the  laws, 
and  partly,  if  we  judge  from  his  manner,  because  he  is 


AS    IN    THE    ACTIVE    VIRTUES.  293 

detained  by  a  subtle  pride,  as  if  it  were  something  unwor- 
thy of  a  grave  philosopher,  to  be  stealing  away,  as  a  fugi- 
tive, from  the  laws  and  tribunals  of  his  country.  The 
Stoics  indeed  have  it  for  one  of  their  great  principles,  that 
the  true  wisdom  of  life  consists  in  a  passive  power,  viz.,  in 
being  able  to  bear  suffering  rightly.  But  they  mean  by 
this  the  bearing  of  suffering  so  as  not  to  feel  it;  a  steeling  of 
the  mind  against  sensibility,  and  a  raising  of  the  will  into 
such  power  as  to  drive  back  the  pangs  of  life,  or  shake 
them  off.  But  this,  in  fact,  contains  no  allowance  of  pas- 
sive virtue  at  all ;  on  the  contrary,  it  is  an  attempt  so  to 
exalt  the  active  powers,  as  to  even  exclude  every  sort  of 
passion,  or  passivity.  And  Stoicism  corresponds,  in  this 
respect,  with  the  general  sentiment  of  the  world's  great 
characters.  They  are  such  as  like  to  see  things  in  the  he- 
roic vein,  to  see  spirit  and  courage  breasting  themselves 
against  wrong,  and,  where  the  evil  can  not  be  escaped  by 
resistance,  dying  in  a  manner  of  defiance.  Indeed  it  has 
been  the  impression  of  the  world  generally,  that  patience, 
gentleness,  readiness  to  suffer  wrong  without  resistance,  is 
but  another  name  for  weakness. 

But  Christ,  in  opposition  to  all  such  impressions,  man- 
ages to  connect  these  non-resisting  and  gentle  passivities 
with  a  character  of  the  severest  grandeur  and  majesty; 
and,  what  is  more,-  convinces  us  that  no  truly  great  char- 
acter can  exist  without  them. 

Observe  him,  first,  in  what  may  be  called  the  common 
trials  of  existence.  For  if  you  will  put  a  character  to  the 
severest  of  all  tests,  see  whether  it  can  bear,  without  fal- 
tering, the  little,  common  ills  and  hindrances  of  life. 
Many  a  man  will  go  to  his  martyrdom,  with  a  spirit  of 
firmness  and  heroic  composure,  whom  a  little  weariness  or 

25* 


294  HE    IS    NEVER    DISCOMPOSED 

nervous  exhaustion,  some  silly  prejudice,  or  capricious 
opposition,  would,  for  the  moment,  throw  into  a  fit  of  vex- 
ation, or  ill-nature.  Great  occasions  rally  great  principles, 
and  brace  the  mind  to  a  lofty  bearing,  a  bearing  that  is 
even  above  itself.  But  trials  that  make  no  occasion  at  all, 
leave  it  to  show  the  goodness  and  beauty  it  has  in  its  own 
disposition.  And  here  precisely  is  the  superhuman  glory 
of  Christ  as  a  character,  that  he  is  just  as  perfect,  exhibits 
just  as  great  a  spirit,  in  little  trials  as  in  great  ones.  In 
all  the  history  of  his  life,  we  are  not  able  to  detect  the 
faintest  indication  that  he  slips  or  falters.  And  this  is 
the  more  remarkable,  that  he  is  prosecuting  so  great  a 
work,  with  so  great  enthusiasm;  counting  it  his  meat  and 
drink,  and  pouring  into  it  all  the  energies  of  his  life.  For 
when  men  have  great  works  on  hand,  their  very  enthusi- 
asm runs  to  impatience.  When  thwarted  or  unreasonably 
hindered,  their  soul  strikes  fire  against  the  obstacles  they 
meet,  they  worry  themselves  at  every  hindrance,  every 
disappointment,  and  break  out  in  stormy  and  fanatical 
violence.  But  Jesus,  for  some  reason,  is  just  as  even,  just 
as  serene,  in  all  his  petty  vexations,  and  hindrances,  as  if 
he  had  nothing  on  hand  to  do.  A  kind  of  sacred  patience 
invests  him  every  where.  Having  no  element  of  crude 
will  mixed  with  his  work,  he  is  able,  in  all  trial  and  oppo- 
sition, to  hold  a  condition  of  serenity  above  the  clouds, 
and  let  them  sail  under  him,  without  ever  obscuring  the 
sun.  He  is  poor,  and  hungry,  and  weary,  and  despised, 
insulted  by  his  enemies,  deserted  by  his  friends,  but  never 
disheartened,  never  fretted  or  ruffled.  You  see,  meantime, 
that  he  is  no  stoic;  he  visibly  feels  every  such  ill  as  his 
delicate  and  sensitive  nature  must,  but  he  has  some  sacred 
and  sovereign  good  present,  to  mingle  with  his  pains, 


BY    HINDRANCES    AND    TRIALS.  295 

which,  as  it  were  naturally  and  without  any  self- watching, 
allays  them.  He  does  not  seem  to  rule  his  temper,  but 
rather  to  have  none;  for  temper,  in  the  sense  of  passion, 
is  a  fury  that  follows  the  will,  as  the  lightnings  follow  the 
disturbing  forces  of  the  winds  among  the  clouds,  and  ac- 
cordingly where  there  is  no  self-will  to  roll  up  the  clouds 
and  hurl  them  through  the  sky,  the  lightnings  hold  their 
equilibrium  and  are  as  though  they  were  not 

As  regards  what  is  called  pre-eminently  his  passion,  the 
scene  of  martyrdom  that  closes  his  life,  it  is  easy  to  distin- 
guish a  character  in  it  which  separates  it  from  all  mere 
human  martyrdoms.  Thus,  it  will  be  observed,  that  his 
agony,  the  scene  in  which  his  suffering  is  bitterest  and 
most  evident,  is,  on  human  principles,  wholly  misplaced. 
It  comes  before  the  time,  when  as  yet  there  is  no  arrest, 
and  no  human  prospect  that  there  will  be  any.  He  is  at 
large  to  go  where  he  pleases,  and  in  perfect  outward  safety. 
His  disciples  have  just  been  gathered  round  him  in  a  scene 
of  more  than  family  tenderness  and  affection.  Indeed  it  is 
but  a  very  few  hours  since  that  he  was  coming  into  the  city, 
at  the  head  of  a  vast  procession,  followed  by  loud  acclama- 
tions, and  attended  by  such  honors  as  may  fitly  celebrate  the 
inaugural  of  a  king.  Yet  here,  with  no  bad  sign  apparent, 
we  see  him  plunged  into  a  scene  of  deepest  distress,  and 
racked,  in  his  feeling,  with  a  more  than  mortal  agony. 
Coming  out  of  this,  assured  and  comforted,  he  is  shortly 
arrested,  brought  to  trial,  and  crucified ;  where,  if  there  be 
any  thing  questionable  in  his  manner,  it  is  in  the  fact  that 
he  is  even  more  composed  than  some  would  have  him  to 
be,  not  even  stooping  to  defend  himself  or  vindicate  his  in- 
nocence. And  when  he  dies,  it  is  not  as  when  the  mar- 
tyrs die.  They  die  for  what  they  have  said,  and  remain- 


296  HIS    AGONY    NOT    HUMAN. 

ing  silent  will  not  recant.     He  dies  for  what  he  has  not 
said,  and  still  is  silent. 

By  the  misplacing  of  his  agony  thus,  and  the  strange 
silence  he  observes  when  the  real  hour  of  agony  is  come, 
we  are  put  entirely  at  fault  on  natural  principles.  But  it 
was  not  for  him  to  wait,  as  being  only  a  man,  till  he  is 
arrested  and  the  hand  of  death  is  before  him,  then  to  be 
nerved  by  the  occasion  to  a  show  of  victory.  He  that 
was  before  Abraham,  must  also  be  before  his  occasions. 
In  a  time  of  safety,  in  a  cool  hour  of  retirement,  unac- 
countably to  his  friends,  he  falls  into  a  dreadful  contest 
and  struggle  of  mind;  coming  out  of  it,  finally,  to  go 
through  his  most  horrible  tragedy  of  crucifixion,  with  the 
serenity  of  a  spectator! 

Why  now  this  so  great  intensity  of  sorrow?  why  this 
agony?  Was  there  not  something  unmanly  in  it,  some- 
thing unworthy  of  a  really  great  soul?  Take  him  to  be 
only  a  man,  and  there  probably  was;  nay,  if  he  were  a 
woman,  the  same  might  be  said.  But  this  one  thing  is 
clear,  that  no  one  of  mankind,  whether  man  or  woman, 
ever  had  the  sensibility  to  suffer  so  intensely ;  even  show- 
ing the  body,  for  the  mere  struggle  and  pain  of  the  mind, 
exuding  and  dripping  with  blood.  Evidently  there  is 
something  mysterious  here ;  which  mystery  is  vehicle  to 
our  feeling,  and  rightfully  may  be,  of  something  divine. 
What,  we  begin  to  ask,  should  be  the  power  of  a  superhu- 
man sensibility  ?  and  how  far  should  the  human  vehicle 
shake  under  such  a  power?  How  too  should  an  innocent 
and  pure  spirit  be  exercised,  when  about  to  suffer,  in  his 
own  person,  the  greatest  wrong  ever  committed? 

Besides  there  is  a  vicarious  spirit  in  love ;  all  love  in 
.serts  itself  vicariously  into  the  sufferings  and  woes  and,  in 


HIS    PASSION    A    MYSTEEY.  297 

a  certain  sense,  the  sins  of  others,  taking  them  on  itself  as 
a  burden.  How  then,  if  perchance  Jesus  should  be  di- 
vine, an  embodiment  of  God's  love  in  the  world — how 
should  he  feel,  and  by  what  signs  of  feeling  manifest  his 
sensibility,  when  a  fallen  race  are  just  about  to  do  the 
damning  sin  that  crowns  their  guilty  history;  to  crucify 
the  only  perfect  being  that  ever  came  into  the  world ;  to 
crucify  even  him,  the  messenger  and  representative  to  them 
of  the  love  of  God,  the  deliverer  who  has  taken  their  case 
and  cause  upon  him!  Whosoever  duly  ponders  these 
questions,  will  find  that  he  is  led  away,  more  and  more, 
from  any  supposition  of  the  mere  mortality  of  Jesus. 
What  he  looks  upon,  he  will  more  and  more  distinctly  see- 
to  be  the  pathology  of  a  superhuman  anguish.  It  stands, 
he  will  perceive,  in  no  mortal  key.  It  will  be  to  him  the 
anguish,  visibly,  not  of  any  pusillanimous  feeling,  but  of 
holy  character  itself;  nay,  of  a  mysteriously  transcendent, 
or  somehow  divine,  character. 

But  why  did  he  not  defend  his  cause  and  justify  his  in- 
nocence in  the  trial  ?  Partly  because  he  had  the  wisdom 
to  see  that  there  really  was  and  could  be  no  trial,  and  that 
one  who  undertakes  to  plead  with  a  mob,  only  mocks  his 
own  virtue,  throwing  words  into  the  air  that  is  already 
filled  with  the  clamors  of  prejudice.  To  plead  innocence 
in  such  a  case,  is  only  to  make  a  protestation,  such  as  indi- 
cates fear,  and  is  really  unworthy  of  a  great  and  composed 
spirit.  A  man  would  have  done  it,  but  Jesus  did  not. 
Besides,  there  was  a  plea  of  innocence,  in  the  manner  of 
Jesus  and  the  few  very  significant  words  that  he  dropped, 
that  had  an  effect  on  the  mind  of  Pilate,  more  searching 
and  powerful  than  any  formal  protestations.  And  the 
more  we  study  the  conduct  of  Jesus  during  the  whole 


298  HIS    UNDERTAKING 

scene,  the  more  shall  we  be  satisfied  that  he  said  enough ; 
the  more  admire  the  mysterious  composure,  the  wisdom, 
the  self-possession,  and  the  superhuman  patience  of  the 
sufferer.  It  was  visibly  the  death  scene  of  a  transcendent 
love.  He  dies  not  as  a  man,  but  rather  as  some  one  might, 
who  is  mysteriously  more  and  higher.  So  thought  aloud 
the  hard-faced  soldier — "  Truly  this  was  the  Son  of  God." 
As  if  he  had  said — "  I  have  seen  men  die — this  is  not  a 
man.  They  call  him  Son  of  God — he  can  not  be  less." 
Can  he  be  less  to  us  ? 

But  Christ  shows  himself  to  be  a  superhuman  character, 
not  in  the  personal  traits  only,  exhibited  in  his  life,  but 
even  more  sublimely  in  the  undertakings,  works,  and 
teachings  by  which  he  proved  his  Messiahship. 

Consider  then  the  reach  of  his  undertaking ;  which,  if 
he  was  only  a  man,  shows  him  to  have  been  the  most  ex- 
travagant and  even  wildest  of  all  human  enthusiasts.  Con- 
trary to  every  religious  prejudice  of  his  nation  and  even 
of  his  time,  contrary  to  the  comparatively  narrow  and  ex- 
clusive religion  of  Moses  itself  and  to  all  his  training 
under  it,  he  undertakes  to  organize  a  kingdom  of  God,  or 
kingdom  of  heaven  on  earth.  His  purpose  includes  a  new 
moral  creation  of  the  race — not  of  the  Jews  only  and  of  men, 
proselyted  to  their  covenant,  but  of  the  whole  human 
race.  He  declared  thus,  at  an  early  date  in  his  ministry, 
that  many  shall  come  from  the  east  and  the  west  and  sit 
down  with  Abraham,  and  Isaac,  and  Jacob  in  the  king- 
dom of  God ;  that  the  field  is  the  world ;  and  that  God  so 
loves  the  world,  as  to  give  for  it  his  only  begotten  Son. 
He  also  declared  that  his  gospel  shall  be  published  to 
all  nations,  and  gave  his  apostles  their  commission,  to 


IS    NOT    HUMAN.  299 

go  into  all  the  world  and  publish  his  gospel  to  every 
creature. 

Here  then  we  have  the  grand  idea  of  his  mission — it  is 
to  new-create  the  human  race  and  restore  it  to  God,  in  the 
unity  of  a  spiritual  kingdom.  And  upon  this  single  fact, 
Reinhard  erects  a  complete  argument  for  his  extra-human 
character;  going  into  a  formal  review  of  all  the  great 
founders  of  states  and  most  celebrated  lawgivers,  the  great 
heroes  and  defenders  of  nations,  all  the  wise  kings  and 
statesmen,  all  the  philosophers,  all  the  prophet  founders  of 
religions,  and  discovering  as  a  fact  that  no  such  thought 
as  this,  or  nearly  proximate  to  this,  had  ever  before  been 
taken  up  by  any  living  character  in  history ;  showing  also 
how  it  had  happened  to  every  other  great  character,  how- 
ever liberalized  by  culture,  to  be  limited  in  some  way  to 
the  interest  of  his  own  people,  or  empire,  and  set  in  oppo- 
sition, or  antagonism,  more  or  less  decidedly,  to  the  rest  of 
the  world.  But  to  Jesus  alone,  the  simple  Galilean  car- 
penter, it  happens  otherwise ;  that,  having  never  seen  a 
map  of  the  world  in  his  whole  life,  or  heard  the  name  of 
half  the  great  nations  on  it,  he  undertakes,  coming  out 
of  his  shop,  a  scheme  as  much  vaster  and  more  diffi- 
cult than  that  of  Alexander,  as  it  proposes  more  and  what 
is  more  divinely  benevolent !  This  thought  of  a  universal 
kingdom,  cemented  in  God — why,  the  immense  Roman 
Empire  of  his  day,  constructed  by  so  many  ages  of  war 
and  conquest,  is  a  bauble  in  comparison,  both  as  regards 
the  extent  and  the  cost!  And  yet  the  rustic  tradesman  of 
Galilee  propounds  even  this  for  his  errand,  and  that  in  a 
way  of  assurance,  as  simple  and  quiet,  as  if  the  immense 
reach  of  his  plan  were,  in  fact,  a  matter  to  him  of  no  con- 
sideration. 


300  BUT    HIS    CONFIDENCE 

Nor  is  this  all,  there  is  included  in  his  plan,  what,  to  any 
mere  man,  would  be  yet  more  remote  from  the  possible 
confidence  of  his  frailty ;  it  is  a  plan  as  universal  in  time, 
as  it  is  in  the  scope  of  its  objects.  It  does  not  expect  to 
be  realized  in  a  life-time,  or  even  in  many  centuries  to 
come.  He  calls  it,  understandingly,  his  grain  of  mus- 
tard seed;  which,  however,  is  to  grow,  he  declares,  and 
overshadow  the  whole  earth.  But  the  courage  of  Jesus, 
counting  a  thousand  years  to  be  only  a  single  day,  is  equal 
to  the  run  of  his  work.  He  sees  a  rock  of  stability,  where 
men  see  only  frailty  and  weakness.  Peter  himself,  the  im- 
pulsive and  always  unreliable  Peter,  turns  into  rock  and 
becomes  a  great  foundation,  as  he  looks  upon  him.  "  On 
this  rock,"  he  says,  "  I  will  build  my  church,  and  the  gates 
of  hell  shall  not  prevail  against  it."  His  expectation  too 
reaches  boldly  out  beyond  his  own  death ;  that  in  fact  is  to 
be  the  seed  of  his  great  empire — "  except  a  corn  of  wheat 
fall  into  the  ground  and  die,  it  abideth,"  he  says,  "  alone." 
And  if  we  will  see  with  what  confidence  and  courage  he 
adheres  to  his  plan,  when  the  time  of  his  death  approach- 
es— how  far  he  is  from  giving  it  up  as  lost,  or  as  an  ex- 
ploded vision  of  his  youthful  enthusiasm — we  have  only 
to  observe  his  last  interview  with  the  two  sisters  of  Beth- 
any, in  whose  hospitality  he  was  so  often  comforted. 
When  the  box  of  precious  ointment  is  broken  upon  his 
head,  which  Judas  reproves  as  a  useless  expense,  he  dis- 
covers a  sad  propriety,  or  even  prophecy,  in  what  the 
woman  has  done,  as  connected  with  his  death,  now  at 
hand.  But  it  does  not  touch  his  courage,  we  per- 
ceive, or  the  confidence  of  his  plan,  or  even  cast  a  shade 
on  his  prospect.  "  Let  her  alone.  She  hath  done  what 
she  could.  She  is  come  aforehand  to  anoint  my  body  to 


NEVER    FALTERS.  301 

the  burying.  Verily  I  say  unto  you,  wheresoever  this 
gospel  shall  be  preached  throughout  the  whole  world,  this 
also  that  this  woman  hath  done  shall  be  told  for  a  memo- 
rial of  her."  Such  was  the  sublime  confidence  he  had  in 
a  plan  that  was  to  run  through  all  future  ages,  and  would 
scarcely  begin  to  show  its  fruit  during  his  own  life  time. 

Is  this  great  idea  then,  which  no  man  ever  before  con- 
ceived, the  raising  of  the  whole  human  race  to  God,  "a  plan 
sustained  with  such  evenness  of  courage,  and  a  confidence 
of  the  world's  future  so  far  transcending  any  human  ex- 
ample— is  this  a  human  development?  Eegard  the  be- 
nevolence of  it,  the  universality  of  it,  the  religious  grand- 
eur of  it,  as  a  work  readjusting  the  relations  of  God  and 
his  government  with  men — the  cost,  the  length  of  time  it 
will  cover,  and  the  far  off  date  of  its  completion — is  it  in 
this  scale  that  a  Nazarene  carpenter,  a  poor  uneducated 
villager,  lays  out  his  plans  and  graduates  the  confidence 
of  his  undertakings?  There  have  been  great  enthusiasts 
in  the  world,  and  they  have  shown  their  infirmity  by  luna- 
tic airs,  appropriate  to  their  extravagance.  But  it  is  not 
human,  we  may  safely  affirm,  to  lay  out  projects  transcend- 
ing all  human  ability,  like  this  of  Jesus,  and  which  can 
not  be  completed  in  many  thousands  of  years,  doing  it  in 
all  the  airs  of  sobriety,  entering  on  the  performance  with- 
out parade,  and  yielding  life  to  it  firmly  as  the  inaugural 
of  its  triumph.  No  human  creature  sits  quietly  down  to 
a  perpetual  project,  one  that  proposes  to  be  executed  only 
at  the  end,  or  final  harvest  of  the  world.  That  is  not 
human,  but  divine. 

Passing  now  to  what  is  more  interior  in  his  ministry, 
taken  as  a  revelation  of  his  character,  we  are  struck  with 

26 


302  HIS    EXPECTATION 

another  distinction ;  viz.,  that  he  takes  rank  with  the  poor, 
and  grounds  all  the  immense  expectations  of  his  cause  on 
a  beginning  made  with  the*  lowly  and  dejected  classes  of 
the  world.  He  was  born  to  the  lot  of  the  poor.  His 
manners,  tastes,  and  intellectual  attainments,  however, 
visibly  outgrew  his  condition,  and  that  in  such  a  degree 
that,  if  he  had  been  a  mere  human  character,  he  must 
have  suffered  some  painful  distaste  for  the  kind  of  society 
in  which  he  lived.  The  great,  as  we  perceive,  flocked  to 
hear  him,  and  sometimes  came  even  by  night  to  receive 
his  instructions.  He  saw  the  highest  circles  of  society  and 
influence  open  to  him,  if  he  only  desired  to  enter  them. 
And,  if  he  was  a  properly  human  character,  what  virtuous, 
but  rising  young  man  would  have  had  a  thought  of  im- 
propriety, in  accepting  the  elevation  within  his  reach ;  con- 
sidering it  as  the  proper  reward  of  his  industry  and  the 
merit  of  his  character — not  to  speak  of  the  contempt  for 
his  humble  origin,  and  his  humble  associates,  which  every 
upstart  person  of  only  ordinary  virtue  is  so  commonly 
seen  to  manifest.  Still  he  adheres  to  the  poor,  and  makes 
them  the  object  of  his  ministry.  And  what  is  more  pecu- 
liar, he  visibly  has  a  kind  of  interest  in  their  society, 
which  is  wanting  in  that  of  the  higher  classes ;  perceiving, 
apparently,  that  they  have  a  certain  aptitude  for  receiving 
right  impressions,  which  the  others  have  not.  They  are 
not  the  wise  and  prudent,  filled  with  the  conceit  of  learn- 
ing and  station,  but  they  are  the  ingenuous  babes  of 
poverty,  open  to  conviction,  prepared,  by  their  humble 
lot,  to  receive  thoughts  and  doctrines  in  advance  of  their 
age.  Therefore  he  loves  the  poor,  and,  without  descend- 
ing to  their  low  manners,  he  delights  to  be  identified  with 
them.  He  is  more  assiduous  in  their  service  than  other 


IS    IN    THE    POOR.  303 

men  have  been  in  serving  the  great.  He  goes  about  on 
foot,  teaching  them  and  healing  their  sick ;  occupying  his 
great  and  elevated  mind,  for  whole  years,  with  details  of 
labor  and  care,  which  the  nurse  of  no  hospital  had  ever 
laid  upon  him — insanities,  blind  eyes,  fevers,  fluxes,  lep- 
rosies, and  sores.  His  patients  are  all  below  his  level 
and  unable  to  repay  him,  even  by  a  breath  of  congenial 
sympathy ;  and  nothing  supports  him  but  the  conscious- 
ness of  good  which  attends  his  labors. 

Meantime,  consider  what  contempt  for  the  poor  had 
hitherto  prevailed,  among  all  the  great  statesmen  and  phil- 
anthropists of  the  world.  The  poor  were  not  society,  or 
any  part  of  society.  They  were  only  the  conveniences 
and  drudges  of  society ;  appendages  of  luxury  and  state, 
tools  of  ambition,  material  to  be  used  in  the  wars.  No 
man  who  had  taken  up  the  idea  of  some  great  change  or 
reform  in  society,  no  philosopher  who  had  conceived  the 
notion  of  building  up  an  ideal  state  or  republic,  ever 
thought  of  beginning  with  the  poor.  Influence  was  seen 
to  reside  in  the  higher  classes,  and  the  only  hope  of  reach- 
ing the  world,  by  any  scheme  of  social  regeneration,  was 
to  begin  with  them,  and  through  them  operate  its  results. 
But  Christ,  if  we  call  him  a  philosopher,  and,  if  he  is  only 
a  man,  we  can  call  him  by  no  higher  name,  was  the  poor 
man's  philosopher ;  the  first  and  only  one  that  had  ever 
appeared.  Seeing  the  higher  circles  open  to  him,  and 
tempted  to  imagine  that,  if  he  could  once  get  footing  for  his 
doctrine  among  the  influential  and  the  great,  he  should 
thus  secure  his  triumph  more  easily,  he  had  yet  no  such 
thought.  He  laid  his  foundations,  as  it  were,  below  all 
influence,  and,  as  men  would  judge,  threw  himself  away. 
And  precisely  here  did  he  display  a  wisdom  and  a  charac- 


304:       HE  BECOMES  THEIR  PATRON, 

ter  totally  in  advance  of  his  age.  Eighteen  centuries  have 
passed  away,  and  we  now  seem  just  beginning  to  under- 
stand the  transcendent  depth  of  this  feature  in  his  mission 
and  his  character.  We  appear  to  be  just  waking  up  to  it 
as  a  discovery,  that  the  blessing  and  upraising  of  the 
masses  are  the  fundamental  interest  of  society — a  discov- 
ery, however,  which  is  only  a  proof  that  the  life  of  Jesus 
hat  at  length,  begun  to  penetrate  society  and  public  his- 
tory. Tt  is  precisely  this  which  is  working  so  many  and 
great  changes  in  our  times,  giving  liberty  and  right  to  the 
enslaved  many,  seeking  their  education,  encouraging  their 
efforts  by  new  and  better  hopes,  producing  an  aversion  to 
war,  which  has  been  the  fatal  source  of  their  misery  and 
depression,  and  opening,  as  we  hope,  a  new  era  of  comfort, 
light,  and  virtue  in  the  world.  It  is  as  if  some  higher  and 
better  thought  had  visited  our  race — which  higher  thought 
is  in  the  life  of  Jesus.  The  schools  of  all  the  philosophers 
are  gone,  hundreds  of  years  ago,  and  all  their  visions  have 
died  away  into  thin  air ;  but  the  poor  man's  philosopher 
still  lives,  bringing  up  his  poor  to  liberty,  light,  and  char- 
acter and  drawing  the  nations  on  to  a  brighter  and  better 
day. 

At  the  same  time,  the  more  than  human  character  of 
Jesus  is  displayed  also  in  the  fact  that,  identifying  himself 
thus  with  the  poor,  he  is  yet  able  to  do  it,  without  elicit- 
ing any  feelings  of  partisanship  in  them.  To  one  who 
will  be  at  the  pains  to  reflect  a  little,  nothing  will  seem 
more  difficult  than  this ;  to  become  the  patron  of  a  class, 
a  down-trodden  and  despised  class,  without  rallying  in 
them  a  feeling  of  intense  malignity.  And  that  for  the 
reason,  partly,  that  no  patron,  however  just  or  magnan- 


BUT    WILL    NOT    HAVE    THEM    PARTISANS.  305 

imous,  is  ever  quite  able  to  suppress  the  feelings  of  a  par- 
tisan in  himself.  A  little  ambition,  pricked  on  by  a  little 
abuse,  a  faint  desire  of  popularity  playing  over  the  face 
of  his  benevolence,  and  tempting  him  to  loosen  a  little  of 
ill-nature,  as  tinder  to  the  passions  of  his  sect — something 
of  this  kind  is  sure  to  kindle  some  fire  of  malignity  in  his 
clients. 

Besides,  men  love  to  be  partisans.  Even  Paul  and 
Apollos  and  Peter  had  their  sects,  or  schools,  glorying  in 
one  against  another.  With  all  their  efforts,  they  could 
not  suppress  a  weakness  so  contemptible.  But  no  such 
feeling  could  ever  get  footing  under  Christ.  If  his  disci- 
ples had  forbidden  one  to  heal  in  the  name  of  Jesus,  be- 
cause be  followed  not  with  them,  he  gently  rebuked  them, 
and  made  them  feel  that  he  had  larger  views  than  to  suffer 
any  such  folly.  As  the  friend  of  the  poor  and  oppressed 
class,  he  set  himself  openly  against  their  enemies,  and  chas- 
tised them  as  oppressors,  with  the  most  terrible  rebukes. 
He  exposed  the  absurdity  of  their  doctrine,  and  silenced 
them  in  argument ;  he  launched  his  thunderbolts  against 
their  base  hypocrisies ;  but  it  does  not  appear  that  the  pop- 
ulace ever  testified  their  pleasure,  even  by  a  cheer,  or 
gave  vent  to  any  angry  emotion  under  cover  of  his  lead- 
ership. For  there  was  something  still,  in  the  manner  and 
air  of  Jesus,  which  made  them  feel  it  to  be  inappropriate, 
and  even  made  it  impossible.  It  was  as  if  some  being 
were  here,  taking  their  part,  whom  it  were  even  an  irrev- 
erence to  applaud,  much  more  to  second  by  any  partisan 
clamor.  They  would  as  soon  have  thought  of  cheering 
the  angel  in  the  sun,  or  of  rallying  under  him  as  the  head 
of  their  faction.  On  one  occasion,  when  he  had  fed  the 
multitudes  by  a  miracle,  he  saw  that  their  national  super- 

26* 


306  THE    PERFECT     ORIGINALITY 

stitions  were  excited,  and  that,  regarding  him  as  the  Mes- 
siah predicted  in  the  scriptures,  they  were  about  to  take 
him  by  force  and  make  him  their  king ;  but  this  was  a 
national  feeling,  not  the  feeling  of  a  class.  Its  root  was 
superstition,  not  hatred.  His  triumphal  entry  into  Jeru- 
salem, attended  by  the  acclamations  of  the  multitude,  if 
this  be  not  one  of  the  fables  or  myths,  which  our  modern 
criticism  rejects,  is  yet  no  demonstration  of  popular  fac- 
tion, or  party  animosity.  Eobbing  it  of  its  mystical  and 
miraculous  character,  as  the  inaugural  of  the  Messiah,  it 
has  no  real  signification.  In  a  few  hours,  after  all,  these 
hosannas  are  hushed.  Jesus  is  alone  and  forsaken,  and 
the  very  multitudes  he  might  seem  to  have  enlisted,  are 
crying,  " Crucify  him!"  On  the  whole,  it  can  not  be  said 
that  Jesus  was  ever  popular.  He  was  followed,  at  times, 
by  great  multitudes  of  people,  whose  love  of  the  marvel- 
ous worked  on  their  superstitions,  to  draw  them  after  him. 
They  came  also  to  be  cured  of  their  diseases.  They  knew 
him  as  their  friend.  But  there  was  yet  something  in  him 
that  forbade  their  low  and  malignant  feelings  gathering 
into  a  conflagration  round  him.  He  presents,  indeed,  an 
instance  that  stands  alone  in  history,  as  God  at  the  sum- 
mit of  the  worlds,  where  a  person  has  identified  himself 
with  a  class,  without  creating  a  faction,  and  without  be- 
coming a  popular  character. 

Consider  him  next  as  a  teacher ;  his  method  and  man- 
ner, and  the  other  characteristics  of  his  excellence,  apart 
from  his  doctrine.  That  will  be  distinctly  considered  in 
another  place. 

First  of  all,  we  notice  the  perfect  originality  and  inde- 
pendence of  his  teaching.  We  have  a  great  many  men 


OF    HIS    TEACHING.  307 

who  are  original,  in  the  sense  of  being  originators,  within 
a  certain  boundary  of  educated  thought.  But  the  origin- 
ality of  Christ  is  uneducated.  That  he  draws  nothing 
from  the  stores  of  learning,  can  be  seen  at  a  glance.  The 
impression  we  have  in  reading  his  instructions,  justifies 
to  the  letter,  the  language  of  his  cotemporaries,  when 
they  say,  "  this  man  hath  never  learned."  There  is  nothing 
in  any  of  his  allusions,  or  forms  of  speech,  that  indicates 
learning.  Indeed,  there  is  nothing  in  him  that  belongs 
to  his  age  or  country — no  one  opinion,  or  taste,  or  preju- 
dice. The  attempts  that  have  been  made,  in  a  way  of 
establishing  his  mere  natural  manhood,  to  show  that  he 
borrowed  his  sentiments  from  the  Persians  and  the  eastern 
forms  of  religion,  or  that  he  had  been  intimate  with  the 
Essenes  and  borrowed  from  them,  or  that  he  must  have 
been  acquainted  with  the  schools  and  religions  of  Egypt, 
deriving  his  doctrine  from  them — all  attempts  of  the  kind 
have  so  palpably  failed,  as  not  even  to  require  a  deliberate 
answer.  If  he  is  simply  a  man,  as  we  hear,  then  he  is 
most  certainly  a  new  and  singular  kind  of  man,  never 
before  heard  of,  one  who  visibly  is  quite  as  great  a  miracle 
in  the  world  as  if  he  were  not  a  man.  We  can  see  for 
ourselves,  in  the  simple  directness  and  freedom  of  his 
teachings,  that  whatever  he  advances  is  from  himself. 
Shakspeare,  for  instance,  whom  we  name  as  being  proba- 
bly the  most  creative  and  original  spirit  the  world  has 
ever  produced,  one  of  the  class,  too,  that  are  called  self- 
made  men,  is  yet  tinged,  in  all  his  works,  with  human 
learning.  His  glory  is,  indeed,  that  so  much  of  what  is 
great  in  history  and  historic  character,  lives  and  appears 
in  his  dramatic  creations.  He  is  the  high-priest,  we  some- 
times hear,  of  human  nature.  But  Christ,  understanding 


308  NO     DIALECTICS,    NO    ART. 

human  nature  so  as  to  address  it  more  skillfully  than  he, 
derives  no  help  from  historic  examples.  He  is  the  high- 
priest,  rather,  of  the  divine  nature,  speaking  as  one  that 
has  come  out  from  God,  and  has  nothing  to  borrow  from 
the  world.  It  is  not  to  be  detected,  by  any  sign,  that  the 
human  sphere  in  which  he  moved  imparted  any  thing  to 
him.  His  teachings  are  just  as  full  of  divine  nature,  as 
Sbakspeare's  of  human. 

Neither  does  he  teach  by  the  human  methods.  He 
does  not  speculate  about  God,  as  a  school  professor,  draw- 
ing out  conclusions  by  a  practice  on  words,  and  deeming 
that  the  way  of  proof;  he  does  not  build  up  a  frame  of 
evidence  from  below,  by  some  constructive  process,  such 
as  the  philosophers  delight  in ;  but  he  simply  speaks  of 
God  and  spiritual  things  as  one  who  has  come  out  from 
Him,  to  tell  us  what  he  knows.  And  his  simple  telling 
brings  us  the  reality ;  proves  it  to  us  in  its  own  sublime 
self-evidence ;  awakens  even  the  consciousness  of  it  in  our 
own  bosom ;  so  that  formal  arguments  or  dialectic  proofs 
offend  us  by  their  coldness,  and  seem,  in  fact,  to  be  only 
opaque  substances  set  between  us  and  the  light.  Indeed, 
he  makes  even  the  world  luminous  by  his  words — fills  it 
with  an  immediate  and  new  sense  of  God,  which  nothing 
has  ever  been  able  to  expel.  The  incense  of  the  upper 
world  is  brought  out,  in  his  garments,  and  flows  abroad, 
as  a  perfume,  on  the  poisoned  air. 

At  the  same  time,  he  never  reveals  the  infirmity  so 
commonly  shown  by  human  teachers,  when  they  veer  a 
little  from  their  point,  or  turn  their  doctrine  off  by  shades 
of  variation,  to  catch  the  assent  of  multitudes.  He  never 
conforms  to  an  expectation,  even  of  his  friends.  When 
they  look  to  find  a  great  prophet  in  him,  he  offers  nothing 


HIS    COMPREHENSIVENESS    IS    PERFECT.     309 

in  the  modes  of  the  prophets.  When  they  ask  for  places 
of  distinction  in  his  kingdom,  he  rebukes  their  folly,  and 
tells  them  he  has  nothing  to  give,  but  a  share  in  his  re- 
proaches and  his  poverty.  When  they  look  to  see  him 
take  the  sword  as  the  Great  Messiah  of  their  nation, 
calling  the  people  to  his  standard,  he  tells  them  he  is  no 
warrior  and  no  king,  but  only  a  messenger  of  love  to  lost 
men ;  one  that  has  come  to  minister  and  die,  but  not  to 
set  up  or  restore  the  kingdom.  Every  expectation  that 
rises  up  to  greet  him,  is  repulsed ;  and  yet,  so  great  is  the 
power  of  his  manner,  that  multitudes  are  held  fast,  and 
can  not  yield  their  confidence.  Enveloped  as  he  is  in  the 
darkest  mystery,  they  trust  him  still;  going  after  him, 
hanging  on  his  words,  as  if  detained  by  some  charmed 
influence,  which  they  can  not  shake  off  or  resist.  Never 
was  there  a  teacher  that  so  uniformly  baffled  every  ex- 
pectation of  his  followers,  never  one  that  was  followed  so 
persistently. 

Again,  the  singular  balance  of  character  displayed  in 
the  teachings  of  Jesus,  indicates  an  exemption  from  the 
standing  infirmity  of  human  nature.  Human  opinions 
are  formed  under  a  law  that  seems  to  be  universal.  First, 
two  opposite  extremes  are  thrown  up,  in  two  opposite 
leaders  or  parties;  then  a  third  party  enters,  trying  to 
find  what  truth  they  both  are  endeavoring  to  vindicate, 
and  settle  thus  a  view  of  the  subject,  that  includes  the 
truth  and  clears  the  one-sided  extremes,  which  opposing 
words  or  figures,  not  yet  measured  in  their  force,  had  pro- 
duced. It  results,  in  this  manner,  that  no  man,  even  the 
broadest  in  his  apprehensions,  is  ever  at  the  point  of  equi- 
librium as  regards  all  subjects.  Even  the  ripest  of  us  are 
continually  falling  into  some  extreme,  and  losing  our  bal- 


310  HE    IS    CLEAR 

ance,  afterward  to  be  corrected  by  some  other  who  dis- 
covers our  error,  or  that  of  our  school. 

But  Christ  was  of  no  school  or  party,  and  never  went 
to  any  extreme — words  could  never  turn  him  to  a  one- 
sided view  of  any  thing.  This  is  the  remarkable  feet 
that  distinguishes  him  from  any  other  known  teacher  of 
the  world.  Having  nothing  to  work  out  in  a  word- 
process,  but  every  thing  clear  in  the  simple  intuition  of 
his  superhuman  intelligence,  he  never  pushes  himself  to 
any  human  eccentricity.  It  does  not  even  appear  that  he 
is  trying,  as  we  do,  to  balance  opposites  and  clear  extrav- 
agances, but  he  does  it,  as  one  who  can  not  imagine  a  one- 
sided view  of  any  thing.  He  is  never  a  radical,  never  a 
conservative.  He  will  not  allow  his  disciples  to  deny  him 
before  kings  and  governors,  he  will  not  let  them  re- 
nounce their  allegiance  to  Caesar.  He  exposes  the  oppres- 
sions of  the  Pharisees  in  Moses'  seat,  but,  encouraging 'no 
factious  resistance,  says — "do  as  they  command  you." 
His  position  as  a  reformer  was  universal — according  to 
his  principles  almost  nothing,  whether  in  church  or  state, 
or  in  social  life,  was  right — and  yet  he  is  thrown  into  no 
antagonism  against  the  world.  How  a  man  will  do,  when 
he  engages  only  in  some  one  reform,  acting  from  his  own 
human  force;  the  fuming,  storming  phrenzy,  the  holy 
rage  and  tragic  smoke  of  his  violence,  how  he  kindles 
against  opposition,  grows  bitter  and  restive  because  of 
delay,  and  finally  comes  to  maturity  in  a  character  thor- 
oughly detestable — all  this  we  know.  But  Christ,  with 
all  the  world  upon  his  hands,  and  a  reform  to  be  carried 
in  almost  every  thing,  is  yet  as  quiet  and  cordial,  and  as 
little  in  the  attitude  of  bitterness  or  impatience,  as  if  all 
hearts  were  with  him,  or  the  work  already  done :  so  per- 


OP    ALL    STJPEBSTITION.  311 

feet  is  the  balance  of  his  feeling,  so  intuitively  moderated 
is  it  by  a  wisdom  not  human. 

We  can  not  stay  to  sketch  a  full  outline  of  this  partic- 
ular and  sublime  excellence,  as  it  was  displayed  in  his 
life.  It  will  be  seen  as  clearly  in  a  single  comparison  or 
contrast,  as  in  many,  or  in  a  more  extended  inquiry. 
Take,  then,  for  an  example,  what  may  be  observed  in  his 
open  repugnance  to  all  superstition,  combined  with  his 
equal  repugnance  to  what  is  commonly  praised  as  a  mode 
of  liberality.  He  lived  in  a  superstitious  age  and  among 
a  superstitious  people.  He  was  a  person  of  low  educa- 
tion, and  nothing,  as  we  know,  clings  to  the  uneducated 
mind  with  the  tenacity  of  a  superstition.  Lord  Bacon, 
for  example,  a  man  certainly  of  the  very  highest  intellect- 
ual training,  was  yet  infested  by  superstitions  too  childish 
to  be  named  with  respect,  and  which  clung  to  him,  despite 
of  all  his  philosophy,  even  to  his  death.  But  Christ,  with 
no  learned  culture  at  all,  comes  forth  out  of  Galilee,  as 
perfectly  clean  of  all  the  superstitions  of  his  time,  as  if 
he  had  been  a  disciple,  from  his  childhood,  of  Hume  or 
Strauss.  "  You  children  of  superstition  think,"  he  says, 
"  that  those  Galileans,  whose  blood  Pilate  mingled  with 
their  sacrifices,  and  those  eighteen  upon  whom  the  tower 
in  Siloam  fell,  must  have  been  monsters,  to  suffer  such 
things.  I  tell  you,  nay;  but  except  ye  repent,  ye  shall 
all  likewise  perish."  To  another  company  he  says — "You 
imagine,  in  your  Pharisaic  and  legal  morality,  that  the 
Sabbath  of  Moses  stands  in  the  letter ;  but  I  tell  you  that 
the  Sabbath  is  made  for  man,  and  not  man  for  the  Sab- 
bath; little  honor,  therefore,  do  you  pay  to  God,  when 
you  teach  that  it  is  not  lawful  to  do  good  on  this  day. 
Your  washings  are  a  great  point,  you  tithe  herbs  and 


312  HE    IS    NO    LIBERALIST. 

seeds  with  a  sanctimonious  fidelity,  would  it  not  be  as 
well  for  you  teachers  of  the  law,  to  have  some  respect  to 
the  weightier  matters  of  justice,  faith,  and  benevolence  ?" 
Thus,  while  Socrates,  one  of  the  greatest  and  purest  of 
human  souls,  a  man  who  has  attained  to  many  worthy 
conceptions  of  God,  hidden  from  his  idolatrous  country- 
men, is  constrained  to  sacrifice  a  cock  to  Bsculapius,  the 
uneducated  Jesus  lives  and  dies  superior  to  every  super- 
stition of  his  time ;  believing  nothing  because  it  is  be- 
lieved, respecting  nothing  because  it  is  sanctified  by  cus- 
tom and  by  human  observance.  Even  in  the  closing 
scene  of  his  life,  we  see  his  learned  and  priestly  associates 
refusing  to  go  into  the  judgment-hall  of  Caiaphas,  lest 
they  should  be  ceremonially  defiled  and  disqualified  for 
the  feast ;  though  detained  by  no  scruple  at  all  as  regards 
the  instigation  of  a  murder!  While  he,  on  the  other  hand, 
pitying  their  delusions,  prays  for  them  from  his  cross — 
"  Father,  forgive  them,  for  they  know  not  what  they  do." 
And  yet  Christ  is  no  liberal,  never  takes  the  ground  or 
boasts  the  distinction  of  a  liberal  among  his  countrymen, 
because  it  is  not  a  part  of  his  infirmity,  in  discovering  an 
error  here,  to  fly  to  an  excess  there.  His  ground  is  char- 
ity, not  liberality ;  and  the  two  are  as  wide  apart  in  their 
practical  implications,  as  adhering  to  all  truth  and  being 
loose  in  all.  Charity  holds  fast  the  minutest  atoms  of 
truth,  as  being  precious  and  divine,  offended  by  even  so 
much  as  a  thought  of  laxity.  Liberality  loosens  the  terms 
of  truth ;  permitting  easily  and  with  careless  magnanimity 
variations  from  it ;  consenting,  as  it  were,  in  its  own  sov 
ereignty,  to  overlook  or  allow  them ;  and  subsiding  thus,  ere 
long,  into  a  licentious  indifference  to  all  truth,  and  a  gen- 
eral defect  of  responsibility  in  regard  to  it.  Charity  ex- 


HIS    SIMPLICITY    IS    PERFECT.  313 

tends  allowance  to  men ;  liberality,  to  falsities  themselves. 
Charity  takes  the  truth  to  be  sacred  and  immovable ;  lib- 
erality allows  it  to  be  marred  and  maimed  at  pleasure. 
How  different  the  manner  of  Jesus  in  this  respect  from 
that  unreverent,  feeble  laxity,  that  lets  the  errors  be  as 
good  as  the  truths,  and  takes  it  for  a  sign  of  intellectual 
eminence,  that  one  can  be  floated  comfortably  in  the 
abysses  of  liberalism.  "Judge  not,"  he  says,  in  holy 
charity,  "  that  ye  be  not  judged ;"  and  again,  in  holy  ex- 
actness, "  whosoever  shall  break,  or  teach  to  break,  one 
of  these  least  commandments,  shall  be  least  in  the  king- 
dom of  God;"  in  the  same  way,  "he  that  is  not  with  us, 
is  against  us ;"  and  again,  "  he  that  is  not  against  us,  is 
for  us ;"  in  the  same  way  also,  "  ye  tithe  mint,  anise,  and 
cummin ;"  and  again,  "these  things  ought  ye  to  have  done, 
and  not  to  leave  the  other  undone ;"  once  more,  too,  in 
the  same  way,  "  he  that  is  without  sin,  let  him  cast  the 
first  stone;"  and  again,  "go,  and  sin  no  more."  So  mag- 
nificent and  sublime,  so  plainly  divine,  is  the  balance  of 
Jesus.  Nothing  throws  him  off  the  center  on  whict 
truth  rests;  no  prejudice,  no  opposition,  no  attempt  tb 
right  a  mistake,  or  rectify  a  delusion,  or  reform  a  practice. 
If  this  be  human,  I  do  not  know,  for  one,  what  it  is  to  be 
human. 

Again,  it  is  a  remarkable  and  even  superhuman  dis- 
tinction of  Jesus,  that,  while  he  is  advancing  doctrines  so 
far  transcending  all  deductions  of  philosophy,  and  opening 
mysteries  that  defy  all  human  powers  of  explication,  he 
is  yet  able  to  set  his  teachings  in  a  form  of  simplicity, 
that  accommodates  all  classes  of  minds.  And  this,  for  the 
reason  that  he  speaks  directly  to  men's  convictions  them- 
selves, without  and  apart  from  any  learned  and  curious 

27 


HE    IS    INTELLIGIBLE 

elaboration,  such  as  the  uncultivated  can  not  follow.  No 
one  of  the  great  writers  of  antiquity  had  even  pro- 
pounded, as  yet,  a  doctrine  of  virtue  which  the  multitude 
could  understand.  It  was  taught  as  being  TO  xaXov,  [the 
good,]  or  TO  *ps*ov,  [the  becoming,]  or  something  of  that 
nature,  as  distant  from  all  their  apprehensions,  and  as  des- 
titute of  motive  power,  as  if  it  were  a  doctrine  of  mineral- 
ogy. Considered  as  a  gift  to  the  world  at  large,  it  was 
the  gift  of  a  stone,  not  of  bread.  But  Jesus  tells  them  di- 
rectly, in  a  manner  level  to  their  understanding,  what 
.they  want,  what  they  must  do  and  be,  to  inherit  eternal 
life,  and  their  inmost  convictions  answer  to  his  words. 
Besides,  his  doctrine  is  not  so  much  a  doctrine  as  a  biog- 
raphy, a  personal  power,  a  truth  all  motivity,  a  love  walk- 
ing the  earth  in  the  proximity  of  a  mortal  fellowship. 
He  only  speaks  what  goes  forth  as  a  feeling  and  a  power 
in  his  life,  breathing  into  all  hearts.  To  be  capable  of  his 
doctrine,  only  requires  that  the  hearer  be  a  human  creat- 
ure, wanting  to  know  the  truth. 

Call  him  then,  who  will,  a  man,  a  human  teacher; 
what  human  teacher  ever  came  down  thus  upon  the 
soul '  of  the  race,  as  a  beam  of  light  from  the  skies — 
pure  light,  shining  directly  into  the  visual  orb  of  the 
mind,  a  light  for  all  that  live,  a  full  transparent  day,  in 
which  truth  bathes  the  spirit  as  an  element.  Others 
talk  and  speculate  about  truth,  and  those  who  can  may 
follow;  but  Jesus  is  the  truth,  and  lives  it,  and,  if  he 
is  a  mere  human  teacher,  he  is  the  first  who  was  ever 
able  to  find  a  form  for  truth,  at  all  adequate  to  the 
world's  uses.  And  yet  the  truths  he  teaches  out-reach 
all  the  doctrines  of  all  the  philosophers  of  the  world. 
He  excels  them,  a  hundred  fold  more,  in  the  scope  and 


TO    ALL    CLASSES.  315 

grandeur  of  his  doctrine,  than  he  does  in  his  simplicity 
itself. 

Is  this  human  or  is  it  plainly  divine?  If  you  will  see 
what  is  human,  or  what  the  wisdom  of  humanity  would 
ordain,  it  is  this — exactly  what  the  subtle  and  accom- 
plished Celsus,  the  great  adversary  of  Christianity  in  its 
original  promulgation,  alledges  for  one  of  his  principal 
arguments  against  it.  "Woolen  manufacturers,"  he  says, 
"shoemakers,  and  curriers,  the  most  uneducated  and  boor- 
ish of  men  are  zealous  advocates  of  this  religion ;  men  who 
can  not  open  their  mouths  before  the  learned,  and  who 
only  try  to  gain  over  the  women  and  children  in  fam- 
ilies."* And  again,  what  is  only  the  same  objection,  un- 
der a  different  form,  assuming  that  religion,  like  a  philoso- 
phy, must  be  for  the  learned,  he  says,  "He  must  be  void 
of  understanding,  who  can  believe  that  Greeks  and  barba- 
rians, in  Asia,  Europe,  and  Lybia — all  nations  to  the  ends 
of  the  earth — can  unite  in  one  and  the  same  religious  doc- 
trine.'^ So  also,  Plato  says,  "it  is  not  easy  to  find  the 
Father  and  Creator  of  all  existence,  and  when  he  is  found 
it  is  impossible  to  make  him  known  to  all."^;  "But  ex- 
actly this,  says  Justin  Martyr,  "is  what  our  Christ  has  ef- 
fected by  his  power."  And  Tertullian  also,  glorying  in 
the  simplicity  of  the  gospel,  as  already  proved  to  be  a 
truly  divine  excellence,  says,  "Every  Christian  artisan 
has  found  God,  and  points  him  out  to  thee,  and,  in  fact, 
shows  thee  every  thing  which  is  sought  for  in  God,  al- 
though Plato  maintains  that  the  creator  of  the  world  is  not 
easily  found,  and  that,  when  he  is  found,  he  can  not 
be  made  known  to  all."§  Here  then,  we  have  Christ 

*  Neander's  Memorials  of  Christian  Life,  p.  19.        f  Ib.,  p.  33. 
\  Timaeus.        §  Neander's  Memorials  of  Christian  Life,  p.  19. 


316  HIS    MORALITY 

against  Celsus,  and  Christ  against  Plato.  These  agree  in 
assuming  that  we  have  a  God,  whom  only  the  great  can 
mount  high  enough  in  argument  to  know.  Christ  reveals 
a  God  whom  the  humblest  artisan  can  teach,  and  all 
mankind  embrace,  with  a  faith  that  unifies  them  all. 

Again,  the  morality  of  Jesus  has  a  practical  superiority 
to  that  of  all  human  teachers,  in  the  fact  that  it  is  not  an 
artistic,  or  theoretically  elaborated  scheme,  but  one  that  is 
propounded  in  precepts  that  carry  their  own  evidence,  and 
are,  in  fact,  great  spiritual  laws  ordained  by  God,  in  the 
throne  of  religion.  He  did  not  draw  long  arguments  to 
settle  what  the  sum/mum  bonum  is,  and  then  produce  a 
scheme  of  ethics  to  correspond.  He  did  not  go  into  the 
vexed  question,  what  is  the  foundation  of  virtue?  and 
hang  a  system  upon  his  answer.  Nothing  falls  into  an  ar- 
tistic shape,  as  when  Plato  or  Socrates  asks  what  kind  of 
action  is  beautiful  action?  reducing  the  principles  of 
morality  to  a  form  as  difficult  for  the  uncultivated,  as  the 
art  of  sculpture  itself.  Yet,  Christ  excels  them  all  in  the 
beauty  of  his  precepts,  without  once  appearing  to  consider 
their  beauty.  He  simply  comes  forth  telling  us,  from  God, 
what  to  do,  without  deducing  any  thing  in  a  critical  way ; 
and  yet,  while  nothing  has  ever  yet  been  settled  by  the 
critics  and  theorizing  philosophers,  that  could  stand  fast 
and  compel  the  assent  of  the  race,  even  for  a  year,  the 
morality  of  Christ  is  about  as  firmly  seated  in  the  convic- 
tions of  men,  as  the  law  of  gravity  in  their  bodies. 

He  comes  into  the  world  full  of  all  moral  beauty,  as 
God  of  physical ;  and  as  God  was  not  obliged  to  set  him- 
self to  a  course  of  aesthetic  study,  when  he  created  the 
forms  and  landscapes  of  the  world,  so  Christ  comes  to 
his  rules,  by  no  critical  practice  in  words.  He  opens  his 


IS    NOT    ARTISTIC.  317 

lips,  and  the  creative  glory  of  his  mind  pours  itself  forth 
in  living  precepts — Do  tfo  others  as  ye  would  that  others 
should  do  to  you — Blessed  are  the  peacemakers — Smitten 
upon  one  cheek,  turn  the  other — Resist  not  evil — For- 
give your  enemies — Do  good  to  them  that  hate  you — Lend 
not,  hoping  to  receive — Receive  the  truth  as  little  children. 
Omitting  all  the  deep  spiritual  doctrines  he  taught,  and 
taking  all  the  human  teachers  on  their  own  ground,  the 
ground  of  preceptive  morality,  they  are  seen  at  once,  to 
be  meager  and  cold;  little  artistic  inventions,  gleams  of 
high  conceptions  caught  by  study,  having  about  the  same 
relation  to  the  Christian  morality,  that  a  statue  has  to  the 
flexibility,  the  self-active  force,  and  flushing  warmth  of 
man,  as  he  goes  forth  in  the  image  of  his  Creator,  to  be 
the  reflection  of  His  beauty  and  the  living  instrument  of 
his  will.  Indeed,  it  is  the  very  distinction  of  Jesus  that 
he  teaches,  not  a  verbal,  but  an  original,  vital,  and  divine 
morality.  He  does  not  dress  up  a  moral  picture  and  ask 
you  to  observe  its  beauty,  he  only  tells  you  how  to  live ; 
and  the  most  beautiful  characters  the  world  has  ever  seen, 
have  been  those  who  received  and  lived  his  precepts  with- 
out once  conceiving  their  beauty. 

Once  more  it  is  a  high  distinction  of  Christ's  character, 
as  seen  in  his  teachings,  that  he  is  never  anxious  for  the 
success  of  his  doctrine.  Fully  conscious  of  the  fact  that 
the  world  is  against  him,  scoffed  at,  despised,  hated,  alone 
too  in  his  cause,  and  without  partisans  that  have  any  pub- 
lic influence,  no  man  has  ever  been  able  to  detect  in  him  the 
least  anxiety  for  the  final  success  of  his  doctrine.  He  is 
never  jealous  of  contradiction.  When  his  friends  display 
their  dullness  and  incapacity,  or  even  when  they  forsake 
him,  he  is  never  ruffled  or  disturbed.  He  rests  on  his 

27* 


318  NL     ER    AISTXIOUS    FOR    SUCCESS. 

words,  with  a  composure  as  majestic  as  if  lie  were  sitting 
on  the  circle  of  the  heavens.  Now  the  consciousness  of 
truth,  we  are  not  about  to  deny,  has  an  effect  of  this  na- 
ture in  every  truly  great  mind.  But  when  has  it  had  an 
effect  so  complete?  What  human  teacher,  what  great  phi- 
losopher has  not  shown  some  traces  of  anxiety  for  his 
school,  that  indicated  his  weakness;  some  pride  in  his 
friends,  some  dislike  of  his  enemies,  some  traces  of  wound- 
ed ambition,  when  disputed  or  denied  ?  But  here  is  a  lone 
man,  a  humble,  uneducated  man,  never  schooled  into  the 
elegant  fiction  of  an  assumed  composure,  or  practiced  in 
the  conventional  dignities  of  manners,  and  yet,  finding  all 
the  world  against  him,  the  world  does  not  rest  on  its  axle 
more  firmly  than  he  upon  his  doctrine.  Questioned  by 
Pilate  what  he  means  by  truth,  it  is  enough  to  answer — 
"  He  that  is  of  the  truth  heareth  my  voice."  If  this  be 
human,  no  other  man  of  the  race,  we  are  sure,  has  ever 
dignified  humanity  by  a  like  example. 

Such  is  Christ  as  a  teacher.  When  has  the  world  seen  a 
phenomenon  like  this ;  a  lonely  uninstructed  youth,  coming 
forth  amid  the  moral  darkness  of  Galilee,  even  more  dis- 
tinct from  his  age,  and  from  every  thing  around  him,  than 
a  Plato  would  be  rising  up  alone  in  some  wild  tribe  in 
Oregon,  assuming  thus  a  position  at  the  head  of  the  world, 
and  maintaining  it,  for  eighteen  centuries,  by  the  pure  self- 
evidence  of  his  life  and  doctrine !  Does  he  this  by  the  force 
of  mere  human  talent  or  genius?  If  so,  it  is  time  that 
we  begin  to  look  to  genius  for  miracles ;  for  there  is  really 
no  greater  miracle. 

There  is  yet  one  other  and  more  inclusive  distinction  of 
the  character  of  Jesus,  which  must  not  be  omitted,  and 


THE    MORE    FAMILIARLY    KNOWN,  319 

which  sets  him  off  more  widely  from  all  the  mere  men  of 
the  race,  just  because  it  raises  a  contrast  which  is,  at  once, 
total  and  experimental.  Human  characters  are  always 
reduced  in  their  eminence,  and  the  impressions  of  awe 
they  have  raised,  by  a  closer  and  more  complete  acquaint- 
ance. "Weakness  and  blemish  are  discovered  by  familiar- 
ity; admiration  lets  in  qualifiers;  on  approach,  the  halo 
dims  a  little.  But  it  was  not  so  with  Christ.  With  his 
disciples,  in  closest  terms  of  intercourse,  for  three  whole 
years ;  their  brother,  friend,  teacher,  monitor,  guest,  fellow- 
traveler  ;  seen  by  them  under  all  the  conditions  of  public 
ministry,  and  private  society,  where  the  ambition  of  show, 
or  the  pride  of  power,  or  the  ill-nature  provoked  by  an- 
noyance, or  the  vanity  drawn  out  by  confidence,  would 
most  certainly  be  reducing  him  to  the  criticism  even  of 
persons  most  unsophisticated,  he  is  yet  visibly  raising  their 
sense  of  his  degree  and  quality ;  becoming  a  greater  won- 
der, and  holier  mystery,  and  gathering  to  his  person  feel- 
ings of  reverence  and  awe,  at  once  more  general  and  more 
sacred.  Familiarity  operates  a  kind  of  apotheosis,  and  the 
man  becomes  divinity,  in  simply  being  known.  At  first, 
he  is  the  Son  of  Mary  and  the  Nazarene  carpenter.  Next, 
he  is  heard  speaking  with  authority,  as  contrasted  even 
with  the  Scribes.  Next,  he  is  conceived  by  some  to  be 
certainly  Elias,  or  some  one  of  the  prophets,  returned  in 
power  to  the  world.  Peter  takes  him  up,  at  that  point,  as 
being  certainly  the  Christ,  the  great,  mysterious  Messiah ; 
only  not  so  great  that  he  is  not  able  to  reprove  him,  when 
he  begins  to  talk  of  being  killed  by  his  enemies ;  protest- 
ing— "be  it  far  from  thee  Lord."  But  the  next  we  see  of 
the  once  bold  apostle,  he  is  beckoning  to  another,  at  the 
table,  to  whisper  the  Lord  and  ask  who  it  is  that  is  going 


320       THE  DEEPEK  THE  REVERENCE 

to  betray  him;  unable  himself  to  so  much  as  invade  the 
sacred  ear  of  his  Master  with  the  audible  and  open  ques- 
tion. Then,  shortly  after,  when  he  comes  out  of  the  hall 
of  Caiaphas,  flushed  and  flurried  with  his  threefold  lie,  and 
his  base  hypocrisy  of  cursing,  what  do  we  see  but  that, 
simply  catching  the  great  master's  eye,  his  heart  breaks 
down,  riven  with  insupportable  anguish,  and  is  utterly  dis- 
solved in  childish  tears.  And  so  it  will  be  discovered  in  all 
the  disciples,  that  Christ  is  more  separated  from  them,  and 
holds  them  in  deeper  awe,  the  closer  he  comes  to  them  and 
the  more  perfectly  they  know  him.  The  same  too  is  true 
of  his  enemies.  At  first,  they  look  on  him  only  as  some 
new  fanatic,  that  has  come  to  turn  the  heads  of  the  peo- 
ple. Next,  they  want  to  know  whence  he  drew  his  opin- 
ions, and  his  singular  accomplishments  in  the  matter  of 
public  address;  not  being,  as  all  that  knew  him  testify,  an 
educated  man.  Next,  they  send  out  a  company  to  arrest 
him,  and,  when  they  hear  him  speak,  they  are  so  deeply 
impressed  that  they  dare  not  do  it,  but  go  back,  under  a 
kind  of  invincible  awe,  testifying — "never  man  spake  like 
this  man."  Afterward,  to  break  some  fancied  spell  there 
may  be  in  him,  they  hire  one  of  his  own  friends  to  betray 
him;  and  even  then,  when  they  are  come  directly  before 
him  and  hear  him  speak,  they  are  in  such  tremor  of  appre- 
hension, lest  he  should  suddenly  annihilate  them,  that  they 
reel  incontinently  backward  and  are  pitched  on  the  ground. 
Pilate  trembles  visibly  before  him,  and  the  more  because  of 
his  silence  and  his  wonderful  submission.  And  then,  when 
the  fatal  deed  is  done,  what  do  we  see  but  that  the  multi- 
tude, awed  by  some  dread  mystery  in  the  person  of  the  cru- 
cified, return  home  smiting  on  their  breasts  for  anguish,  in 
the  sense  of  what  their  infatuated  and  guilty  rage  has  done. 


IN    WHICH    HE    IS    HELD.  321 

The  most  conspicuous  matter  therefore,  in  the  history 
of  Jesus,  is,  that  what  holds  true,  in  all  our  experience 
of  men,  is  inverted  in  him.  He  grows  sacred,  peculiar, 
wonderful,  divine,  as  acquaintance  reveals  him.  At  first 
he  is  only  a  man,  as  the  senses  report  him  to  be ;  knowl- 
edge, observation,  familiarity,  raise  him  into  the  God- 
man.  He  grows  pure  and  perfect,  more  than  mortal  in 
wisdom,  a  being  enveloped  in  sacred  mystery,  a  friend  to 
be  loved  in  awe — dies  into  awe,  and  a  sorrow  that  con- 
tains the  element  of  worship !  And  exactly  this  appears 
in  the  history,  without  any  token  of  art,  or  even  apparent 
consciousness  that  it  does  appear — appears  because  it  is 
tme;  Probably  no  one  of  the  evangelists,  ever  so  much 
as  noticed  this  remarkable  inversion  of  what  holds  good 
respecting  men,  in  the  life  and  character  of  Jesus.  Is  this 
character  human,  or  is  it  plainly  divine? 

We  have  now  sketched  some  of  the  principal  distinc- 
tions of  the  superhuman  character  of  Jesus.  We  have 
seen  him  unfolding  as  a  flower,  from  the  germ  of  a  perfect 
youth ;  growing  up  to  enter  into  great  scenes  and  have  his 
part  in  great  trials;  harmonious  in  all  with  himself  and 
truth,  a  miracle  of  celestial  beauty.  He  is  a  Lamb  in  in- 
nocence, a  God  in  dignity;  revealing  an  impenitent  but 
faultless  piety,  such  as  no  mortal  ever  attempted,  such  as, 
to  the  highest  of  mortals,  is  inherently  impossible.  He 
advances  the  most  extravagant  pretensions,  without  any 
show  of  conceit,  or  even  seeming  fault  of  modesty.  He 
suffers  without  affectation  of  composure  and  without  re- 
straint of  pride,  suffers  as  no  mortal  sensibility  can,  and 
where,  to  mortal  view,  there  was  no  reason  for  pain  at  all; 
giving  us  not  only  an  example  of  gentleness  and  patience 


322  SUCH    A    CHARACTER 

in  all  the  small  trials  of  life,  but  revealing  the  depths  even 
of  the  passive  virtues  of  God,  in  his  agony  and  the 
patience  of  his  suffering  love.  He  undertakes  also  a  plan, 
universal  in  extent,  perpetual  in  time;  viz.,  to  unite  all 
nations  in  a  kingdom  of  righteousness  under  God;  laying 
his  foundations  in  the  hearts  of  the  poor,  as  no  great  teach- 
er had  ever  done  before,  and  yet  without  creating  ever  a 
faction,  or  stirring  one  partisan  feeling  in  his  followers. 
In  his  teachings  he  is  perfectly  original,  distinct  from  his 
age  and  from  all  ages;  never  warped  by  the  expectation 
of  his  friends ;  always  in  a  balance  of  truth,  swayed  by  no 
excesses,  running  to  no  oppositions  or  extremes ;  clear  of 
all  superstition,  and  equally  clear  of  all  liberalism ;  pre- 
senting the  highest  doctrines  in  the  lowest  and  simplest 
forms ;  establishing  a  pure,  universal  morality,  never  be- 
fore established ;  and,  with  all  his  intense  devotion  to  the 
truth,  never  anxious,  perceptibly,  for  the  success  of  his 
doctrine.  Finally,  to  sum  up  all  in  one,  he  grows  more 
great,  and  wise,  and  sacred,  the  more  he  is  known — needs, 
in  fact,  to  be  known,  to  have  his  perfection  seen.  And 
this,  we  say,  is  Jesus,  the  Christ;  manifestly  not  human, 
not  of  our  world — some  being  who  has  burst  into  it, 
and  is  not  of  it.  Call  him  for  the  present,  that  "holy 
thing"  and  say,  "by  this  we  believe  that  thou  earnest  from 
God." 

Not  to  say  that  we  are  dissatisfied  with  this  sketch, 
would  be  almost  an  irreverence  of  itself,  to  the  subject  of 
it.  Who  can  satisfy  himself  with  any  thing  that  he  can  say 
of  Jesus  Christ?  We  have  seen,  how  many  pictures  of 
the  sacred  person  of  Jesus,  by  the  first  masters;  but  not 
one,  among  them  all,  that  did  not  rebuke  the  weakness 
which  could  dare  attempt  an  impossible  subject.  So  of 


DID    ACTUALLY    EXIST.  323 

the  character  of  Jesus.  It  is  necessary,  for  the  holy  inter- 
est of  truth,  that  we  should  explore  it,  as  we  are  best 
able ;  but  what  are  human  thoughts  and  human  concep- 
tions, on  a  subject  that  dwarfs  all  thought  and  immediately 
outgrows  whatever  is  conceived.  And  yet,  for  the  rea- 
son that  we  have  failed,  we  seem  also  to  have  succeeded. 
For  the  more  impossible  it  is  found  to  be,  to  grasp  the 
character  and  set  it  forth,  the  more  clearly  is  it  seen  to  be 
above  our  range — a  miracle  and  a  mystery. 

Two  questions  now  remain  which  our  argument  requires 
to  be  answered.  And  the  first  is  this — did  any  such  char- 
acter, as  this  we  have  been  tracing,  actually  exist  ?  Ad 
mitting  that  the  character,  whether  it  be  fact  or  fiction,  is 
such  as  we  have  seen  it  to  be,  two  suppositions  are  open, 
either  that  such  a  character  actually  lived,  and  was  possi- 
ble to  be  described,  because  it  furnished  the  matter  of  the 
picture,  itself;  or  else,  that  Jesus,  being  a  merely  human 
character  as  he  lived,  was  adorned  or  set  off  in  this  man- 
ner, by  the  exaggerations  of  fancy,  and  fable,  and  wild  tra- 
dition afterward.  In  the  former  alternative,  we  have  the 
insuperable  difficulty  of  believing,  that  any  so  perfect  and 
glorious  character  was  ever  attained  to  by  a  mortal.  If 
Christ  was  a  merely  natural  man,  then  was  he  under  all 
the  conditions  privative,  as  regards  the  security  of  his  vir- 
tue, that  we  have  discovered  in  man.  He  was  a  new-cre- 
ated being,  as  such  to  be  perfected  in  a  character  of  stead- 
fast holiness,  only  by  the  experiment  of  evil  and  redemp- 
tion from  it.  We  can  believe  any  miracle,  therefore,  more 
easily  than  that  Christ  was  a  man,  and  yet  a  perfect  char- 
acter, such  as  here  is  given.  In  the  latter  alternative,  we 
have  four  different  writers,  widely  distinguished  in  their 


324  HE    WAS    AN    ACTUALLY 

style  and  mental  habit — inferior  persons,  all,  as  regards 
their  accomplishments,  and  none  of  them  remarkable  for 
gifts  of  genius — contributing  their  parts,  and  coalescing  thus 
in  the  representation  of  a  character  perfectly  harmonious 
with  itself  and,  withal,  a  character  whose  ideal  no  poet 
had  been  able  to  create,  no  philosopher,  by  the  profound- 
est  effort  of  thought,  to  conceive  and  set  forth  to  the 
world.  What  is  more,  these  four  writers  are,  by  the  sup- 
position, children  all  of  credulity,  retailing  the  absurd  gos- 
sip and  the  fabulous  stories  of  an  age  of  marvels,  and  yet, 
by  some  accident,  they  are  found  to  have  conceived  and 
sketched  the  only  perfect  character  known  to  mankind. 
To  believe  this,  requires  a  more  credulous  age  than  these 
writers  ever  saw.  We  fall  back  then  upon  our  conclu- 
sion, and  there  we  rest.  Such  was  the  real  historic  char- 
acter of  Jesus.  Thus  he  lived,  and  the  character  is  possi- 
ble to  be  conceived,  because  it  was  actualized  in  a  living 
example.  The  only  solution  is  that  which  is  given  by 
Jesus  himself,  when  he  says — "I  came  forth  from  the  Fa- 
ther, and  am  come  into  the  world." 

The  second  question  is  this;  whether  this  character  is 
to  be  conceived  as  an  actually  existing,  sinless  character  in 
the  world.  That  it  is  I  maintain,  because  the  character 
can  no  otherwise  be  accounted  for  in  its  known  excellences. 
How  was  it  that  a  simple-minded  peasant  of  Galilee,  was 
able  to  put  himself  in  advance,  in  this  manner,  of  all  hu- 
man teaching  and  excellence ;  unfolding  a  character  so  pe- 
culiar in  its  combinations,  and  so  plainly  impossible  to  any 
mere  man  of  the  race?  Because  his  soul  was  filled  with 
internal  beauty  and  purity,  having  no  spot,  or  stain,  dis- 
torted by  no  obliquity  of  view  or  feeling,  lapsing  there- 
fore into  no  eccentricity  or  deformity.  We  can  make  out 


SINLESS    CHARACTER.  325 

no  account  of  him  so  easy  to  believe,  as  that  he  was  sin- 
less; indeed,  we  can  make  no  other  account  of  him  at 
all.  He  realized  what  are,  humanly  speaking,  impossibil- 
ities ;  for  his  soul  was  warped  and  weakened  by  no  hu- 
man infirmities,  doing  all  in  a  way  of  ease  and  natural- 
ness, just  because  it  is  easy  for  clear  waters  to  flow  from  a 
pure  spring.  To  believe  that  Jesus  got  up  these  high  con- 
ceptions artistically,  and  then  acted  them,  in  spite  of  the 
conscious  disturbance  of  his  internal  harmony,  and  the 
conscious  clouding  of  his  internal  purity  by  sin,  would  in- 
volve a  degree  of  credulity  and  a  want  of  perception,  as  re- 
gards the  laws  of  the  soul  and  their  necessary  action  un- 
der sin,  so  lamentable  as  to  be  a  proper  subject  of  pity. 
We  could  sooner  believe  all  the  fables  of  the  Talmud. 

Besides,  if  Jesus  was  a  sinner,  he  was  conscious  of  sin 
as  all  sinners  are,  and  therefore  was  a  hypocrite  in  the 
whole  fabric  of  his  character ;  realizing  so  much  of  divine 
beauty  in  it,  maintaining  the  show  of  such  unfaltering  har- 
mony and  celestial  grace,  and  doing  all  this  with  a  mind 
confused  and  fouled  by  the  affectations  acted  for  true  vir- 
tues !  Such  an  example  of  successful  hypocrisy  would  be 
itself  the  greatest  miracle  ever  heard  of  in  the  world. 

Furthermore,  if  Jesus  was  a  sinner,  then  he  was,  of 
course,  a  fallen  being;  down  under  the  bondage,  distorted 
by  the  perversity  of  sin  and  its  desolating  effects,  as  men 
are.  The  root  therefore  of  all  his  beauty  is  guilt.  Evil 
has  broken  loose  in  him,  he  is  held  fast  under  evil.  Bad 
thoughts  are  streaming  through  his  soul  in  bad  succes- 
sions; his  tempers  have  lost  their  tune;  his  affections 
have  been  touched  by  leprosy ;  remorse  scowls  upon  his 
heart ;  his  views  have  lost  their  balance  and  contracted  ob- 
liquity ;  in  a  word,  he  is  fallen.  Is  it  then  such  a  being,  one 

28 


326  SPECIFICATIONS    AGAINST    IT 

who  has  been  touched,  in  this  manner,  by  the  demonic 
spell  of  evil — is  it  he  that  is  unfolding  such  a  character? 

What  then  do  our  critics  in  the  school  of  naturalism 
say  of  this  character  of  Christ?  Of  course  they  are 
obliged  to  say  many  handsome  and  almost  saintly  things 
of  it.  Mr.  Parker  says  of  him,  that — "He  unites  in  him- 
self the  sublimest  precepts  and  divinest  practices,  thus 
more  than  realizing  the  dream  of  prophets  and  sages; 
rises  free  from  all  prejudice  of  his  age,  nation,  or  sect; 
gives  free  range  to  the  spirit  of  God,  in  his  breast;  sets 
aside  the  law,  sacred  and  true — honored  as  it  was,  its 
forms,  its  sacrifice,  its  temple,  its  priests;  puts  away  the 
doctors  of  the  law,  subtle,  irrefragable,  and  pours  out  a 
doctrine  beautiful  as  the  light,  sublime  as  Heaven,  and 
true  as  God."*  Again — as  if  to  challenge  for  his  doc- 
trine, the  distinction  of  a  really  superhuman  excellence — 
"  Try  him  as  we  try  other  teachers.  They  deliver  their 
word,  find  a  few  waiting  for  the  consolation  who  accept 
the  new  tidings,  follow  the  new  method,  and  soon  go  be- 
yond their  teacher,  though  less  mighty  minds  than  he. 
Though  humble  men,  we  see  what  Socrates  and  Luther 
never  saw.  But  eighteen  centuries  have  past,  since  the 
Sun  of  humanity  rose  so  high  in  Jesus;  what  man,  what 
sect  has  mastered  his  thought,  comprehended  his  method, 
and  so  fully  applied  it  to  life!"f 

Mr.  Hennel,  who  writes  in  a  colder  mood,  but  has,  on 
the  whole,  produced  the  ablest  of  all  the  arguments  yet  of- 
fered on  this  side,  speaks  more  cautiously.  He  says — 
"Whilst  no  human  character,  in  the  history  of  the  world, 
can  be  brought  to  mind,  which,  in  proportion  as  it  could 
be  closely  examined,  did  not  present  some  defects,  dis- 

*  Discourses  of  Religion,  p.  294.        f  Ib.,  p.  303. 


BY  PARKER  AND  HENNEL.        327 

qualifying  it  for  being  the  emblem  of  moral  perfection,  we 
can  rest,  with  least  check  or  sense  of  incongruity,  on  the 
imperfectly  known  character  of  Jesus  of  Nazareth."* 

But  the  intimation  here  is  that  the  character  is  not  per- 
fect ;  it  is  only  one  in  which  the  sense  of  perfection  suffers 
"  least  check."  And  where  is  the  fault  charged  ?  Why, 
it  is  discovered  that  Jesus  cursed  a  fig-tree,  in  which  he  is 
seen  to  be  both  angry  and  unreasonable.  He  denounced 
the  Pharisees  in  terms  of  bitter  animosity.  He  also  drove 
the  money-changers  out  of  the  temple  with  a  scourge  of 
rods,  in  which  he  is  even  betrayed  into  an  act  of  physical 
violence.  These  and  such  like  specks  of  fault  are  discov- 
ered, as  they  think,  in  the  life  of  Jesus.  So  graceless  in 
our  conceit,  have  we  of  this  age  grown,  that  we  can  think 
it  a  point  of  scholarly  dignity  and  reason  to  spot  the  only 
perfect  beauty  that  has  ever  graced  our  world,  with  such 
discovered  blemishes  as  these !  As  if  sin  could  ever  need 
to  be  made  out  against  a  real  sinner,  in  this  small  way 
of  special  pleading;  or  as  if  it  were  ever  the  way  of  sin 
to  err  in  single  particles  or  homeopathic  quantities 
of  wrong!  A  more  just  sensibility  would  denounce  this 
malignant  style  of  criticism,  as  a  heartless  and  really  low- 
minded  pleasure  in  letting  down  the  honors  of  goodness. 

In  justice  to  Mr.  Parker,  it  must  be  admitted  that  he 
does  not  actually  charge  these  points  of  history  as  faults, 
or  blemishes  in  the  character  of  Jesus.  And  yet,  in 
justice  also,  it  must  be  added  that  he  does  compose 
a  section  under  the  heading — "  The  Negative  Side,  or  the- 
Limitations  of  Jesus" — where  these,  with  other  like  mat- 
ters, are  thrown  in  by  insinuation,  as  possible  charges 
sometimes  advanced  by  others.  For  himself,  he  alledges 

*Inquiry,  p.  451. 


328  THE    MANLIER    OPINION 

nothing  positive,  but  that  Jesus  was  under  the  popular 
delusion  of  his  time,  in  respect  to  devils  or  demoniacal 
possessions,  and  that  he  was  mistaken  in  some  of  his  ref- 
erences to  the  Old  Testament.  What  now  is  to  be 
thought  of  such  material,  brought  forward  under  such  a 
heading,  to  flaw  such  a  character !  Is  it  sure  that  Christ 
was  mistaken  in  his  belief  of  the  foul  spirits  ?  Is  it  cer- 
tain that  a  sufficient  mode  of  interpretation  will  not  clear 
his  references  of  mistake  ?  And  so,  when  it  is  suggested, 
at  second  hand,  that  his  invective  is  too  fierce  against  the 
Pharisees,  is  there  no  escape,  but  to  acknowledge  that, 
"considering  his  youth,  it  was  a  venial  error?"  Or,  if 
there  be  no  charge  but  this,  "  at  all  affecting  the  moral 
and  religious  character  of  Jesus,"  should  not  a  just  rever- 
ence to  one  whose  life  is  so  nearly  faultless,  constrain  us 
to  look  for  some  more  favorable  construction,  that  takes 
the  solitary  blemish  away  ?  Is  it  true  that  invective  is  a 
necessary  token  of  ill-nature?  Are  there  no  occasions 
where  even  holiness  will  be  most  forward  in  it?  And 
when  a  single  man  stands  out  alone,  facing  a  whole  living 
order  and  caste,  that  rule  the  time — oppressors  of  the 
poor,  hypocrites  and  pretenders  in  religion,  corrupters  of 
all  truth  and  faith,  under  the  names  of  learning  and  relig- 
ion— is  the  malediction,  the  woe,  that  he  hurls  against 
them,  to  be  taken  as  a  fault  of  violence  and  unregulated 
passion ;  or,  considering  what  amount  of  force  and  public 
influence  he  dares  to  confront  and  set  in  deadly  enmity 
against  his  person,  is  he  rather  to  be  accepted  as  God's 
champion,  in  the  honors  of  a  great  and  genuinely  heroic 
spirit  ? 

Considering  how  fond  the  world  is  of  invective,  how 
ready  to  admire  the  rhetoric  of  sharp  words,  how  manv 


OF    MILTON.  329 

speakers  study  to  excel  in  the  fine  art  of  excoriation,  how 
many  reformers  are  applauded  in  vehement  attacks  on 
character,  and  win  a  great  repute  of  fearlessness,  just  be- 
cause of  their  severity,  when,  in  fact,  there  is  nothing  to 
fear — when  possibly  the  subject  is  a  dead  man,  not  yet 
buried — it  is  really  a  most  striking  tribute  to  the  more 
than  human  character  of  Jesus,  that  we  are  found 
to  be  so  apprehensive  respecting  him  in  particular, 
lest  his  plain,  unstudied,  unrhetorical  severities  on  this  or 
that  occasion,  may  imply  some  possible  defect,  or  "  venial 
error,"  in  him.  "Why  this  special  sensibility  to  fault  in 
him  ?  save  that,  by  his  beautiful  and  perfect  life,  he  has 
raised  our  conceptions  so  high  as  to  make,  what  we  might 
applaud  in  a  man,  a  possible  blemish  in  his  divine  ex- 
cellence ? 

The  glorious  old  reformer  and  blind  poet  of  Puritan- 
ism— vindicator  of  a  free  commonwealth  and  a  free,  un- 
prelatical  religion — holds,  in  our  view,  a  far  worthier  and 
manlier  conception  of  what  Christ  does,  in  this  example, 
and  of  what  is  due  to  all  the  usurpations  of  titled  conceit 
and  oppression  in  the  world.  With  truly  refreshing  ve- 
hemence, he  writes — "For  in  times  of  opposition,  when 
against  new  heresies  arising,  or  old  corruptions  to  be  re- 
formed, this  cool,  impassionate  mildness  of  positive  wis- 
dom is  not  enough  to  damp  and  astonish  the  proud  resist- 
ance of  carnal  and  false  doctors,  then  (that  I  may  have 
leave  to  soar  awhile,  as  the  poets  use,)  Zeal,  whose  sub- 
stance is  ethereal,  arming  in  complete  diamond,  ascends 
his  fiery  chariot,  drawn  by  two  blazing  meteors  figured 
like  beasts,  but  of  a  higher  breed  than  any  the  zodiac 
yields,  resembling  those  four  which  Ezekiel  and  St.  John 
saw,  the  one  visaged  like  a  lion,  to  express  power,  high 

28* 


330         THE    CHANGE,    SUCH    A    CHARACTER 

authority,  and  indignation,  the  other  of  man,  to  cast  de- 
rision and  scorn  upon  perverse  and  fraudulent  seducers — 
with  them  the  invincible  warrior,  Zeal,  shaking  loosely 
the  slack  reins,  drives  over  the  heads  of  scarlet  prelates 
and  such  as  are  insolent  to  maintain  traditions,  bruising 
their  stiff  necks  under  his  flaming  wheels.  Thus  did  the 
true  prophets  of  old  combat  with  the  false ;  thus  Christ, 
himself  the  fountain  of  meekness,  found  acrimony  enough 
to  be  still  galling  and  vexing  the  prelatical  Pharisees. 
But  ye  will  say,  these  had  immediate  warrant  from  God 
to  be  thus  bitter;  and  I  say,  so  much  the  plainer  is  it 
found  that  there  may  be  a  sanctified  bitterness  against  the 
enemies  of  the  truth."* 

And  what  other  conception  had  Christ  himself  of  the 
meaning  and  import  of  his  conduct  in  the  matter  in  ques- 
tion ?  He  felt  a  zeal  within  him,  answering  to  Milton's 
picture,  which  could  not,  must  not,  be  repressed.  He 
knew  it  would  be  blamed,  or  set  in  charge  against  him, 
by  false  critics  and  uncharitable  doubters — and  he  said, 
"  The  zeal  of  thy  house  hath  eaten  me  up."  And  still  it 
was,  when  rightly  viewed,  only  a  necessary  outburst  of 
that  indignant  fire,  which  is  kindled  in  the  sweet  bosom 
of  innocence,  by  the  insolence  of  hypocrisy  and  oppres- 
sion. 

I  conclude,  then,  (1.)  that  Christ  actually  lived  and  bore 
the  real  character  ascribed  to  him  in  the  history.  And 
(2.)  that  he  was  a  sinless  character.  How  far  off  is  he 
now  from  any  possible  classification  in  the  genus  human- 
ity !  Having  reached  this  point,  we  are  ready  to  pass,  in 
the  next  chapter,  to  the  Christian  miracles,  and  show  that 
Christ,  being  himself  the  greatest  of  all  miracles,  in  his 

*  Apology  for  Smectymnus,  Sect.  I. 


HAS    MADE    IN    OUR    WORLD,  831 

own  person,  did,  in  perfect  consistency,  and  without  creat- 
ing any  greater  difficulty,  work  miracles. 

But  before  we  drop  a  theme  like  this,  let  us  note  more 
distinctly  the  significance  of  this  glorious  advent,  and 
have  our  congratulations  in  it.  This  one  perfect  charac- 
ter has  come  into  our  world,  and  lived  in  it ;  filling  all 
the  molds  of  action,  all  the  terms  of  duty  and  love,  with 
his  own  divine  manners,  works,  and  charities.  All  the 
conditions  of  our  life  are  raised  thus,  by  the  meaning  he 
has  shown  to  be  in  them,  and  the  grace  he  has  put  upon 
them.  The  world  itself  is  changed,  and  is  no  more  the 
same  that  it  was ;  it  has  never  been  the  same,  since  Jesus 
left  it.  The  air  is  charged  with  heavenly  odors,  and  a 
kind  of  celestial  consciousness,  a  sense  of  other  worlds,  is 
wafted  on  us  in  its  breath.  Let  the  dark  ages  come,  let 
society  roll  backward  and  churches  perish  in  whole  re- 
gions of  the  earth,  let  infidelity  deny,  and,  what  is  worse, 
let  spurious  piety  dishonor  the  truth ;  still  there  is  a  some- 
thing here  that  was  not,  and  a  something  that  has  immor- 
tality in  it.  Still  our  confidence  remains  unshaken,  that 
Christ  and  his  all-quickening  life  are  in  the  world,  as  fixed 
elements,  and  will  be  to  the  end  of  time;  for  Christianity 
is  not  so  much  the  advent  of  a  better  doctrine,  as  of  a  per- 
fect character ;  and  how  can  a  perfect  character,  on^c  en- 
tered into  life  and  history,  be  separated  and  finally  expelled  ? 
It  were  easier  to  untwist  all  the  beams  of  light  in  the  sky, 
separating  and  expunging  one  of  the  colors,  than  to  get  the 
character  of  Jesus,  which  is  the  real  gospel,  out  of  the 
world.  Look  ye  hither,  meantime,  all  ye  blinded  and 
fallen  of  mankind,  a  better  nature  is  among  you,  a  pure 
heart,  out  of  some  pure  world,  is  come  into  your  prison, 


332  IS    RADICAL    AND    FINAL. 

and  walks  it  with  you.  Do  you  require  of  us  to  show  who 
he  is,  and  definitely  to  expound  his  person?  "We  may 
not  be  able.  Enough  to  know  that  he  is  not  of  us — some 
strange  being  out  of  nature  and  above  it,  whose  name  is 
Wonderful.  Enough  that  sin  has  never  touched  his  hal- 
lowed nature,  and  that  he  is  a  friend.  In  him  dawns  a 
hope — purity  has  not  come  into  our  world,  except  to  pu- 
rify. Behold  the  Lamb  of  Grod,  that  taketh  away  the  sins 
of  the  world !  Light  breaks  in,  peace  settles  on  the  air, 
lo !  the  prison  walls  are  giving  way — rise,  let  us  go. 


CHAPTER  XI. 

CHRIST  PERFORMED  MIRACLES. 

IT  used  to  be  the  practice  of  theologians,  to  cite  the 
miracles  of  Christ  as  proofs  of  his  doctrine,  and  even  of 
the  gospel  history ;  not  observing  that  the  conditions  of 
the  question  are  entirely  changed  since  the  days  of  the 
first  witnesses.  To  the  cotemporaries  and  attendants  on 
the  ministry  of  Jesus,  he  might  well  enough  be  approved 
of  God,  by  miracles  and  signs;  for,  being  themselves 
eye-witnesses,  they  could  easily  be  sure  of  the  facts.  But 
to  those  who  saw  them  not,  to  us  who  have  heard  of  them 
only  by  the  report  of  history,  they  can  never  be  cited  as 
proofs,  because  the  main  thing  to  be  settled,  with  us,  is 
the  verity  of  the  facts  themselves.  The  gospel  history, 
instead  of  being  attested  to  us  by  the  miracles,  has  them 
rather  as  a  heavy  burden  resting  on  its  own  credibility. 
Doubtless  it  is  true  that,  if  such  a  being  as  Christ  were  to 
come  into  the  world,  on  such  an  errand  as  the  gospel  re- 
ports, we  should  look  to  see  him  verify  his  mission  by 
miracles,  and  without  the  miracles  we  should  suspect  the 
authenticity  of  his  pretensions.  As  far,  therefore,  as  the 
miracles  sort  with  the  person  of  Christ  and  his  mission,  as 
set  forth  in  his  gospels,  there  is  a  harmony  of  parts  in  the 
history,  that  is  one  of  the  evidences  of  its  truth.  It  is 
even  a  necessary  evidence,  yet  scarcely  a  sufficient  evi- 
dence by  itself.  We  still  require  to  be  certified  that  the 
miracles  reported  are  facts.  This  done,  Christianity,  as  a 
supernatural  revelation  of  God,  is  established.  Until 
then,  the  miracles  are,  it  must  be  admitted,  a  subtraction 


334  MODES    OF    DOUBT,    OR    DENIAL 

from  its  rational  evidence ;  even  though  the  subject  mat- 
ter of  the  history  be  incomplete,  and  so  far  wanting  in 
rational  evidence,  without  them. 

The  ground  taken  against  the  Christian  miracles,  by 
Spinoza,  in  which  he  is  followed  by  Mr.  Parker,  is  this : 
that  they  dishonor  God,  as  involving  the  opinion  that  his 
great  revelation  in  nature  is  insufficient,  and  needs  after- 
ward to  be  amended,  and  that,  in  doing  it  by  miracles,  he 
is  conceived  to  overturn  his  own  laws,  and  break  up  the 
order  of  his  work. 

Hume  was  an  atheist,  and,  of  course,  had  nothing  to 
say  of  God,  or  the  confusion  of  his  plan.  Assuming  that 
we  know  nothing  save  by  experience,  he  argued  that  we 
know  by  experience  the  fallibility  of  all  testimony,  and 
the  uniformity  of  the  laws  of  nature.  Hence  that  no 
amount  of  testimony  can  justify  our  belief  in  a  miracle; 
for  we  have,  and  must  have,  a  stronger  faith  in  the  uni- 
formity of  the  laws  of  nature,  than  we  can  have  in  any 
testimony. 

Assisted  in  this  skeptical  tendency  by  modern  science, 
which  has  set  the  laws  of  nature,  for  the  time,  in  such 
prominence,  as  to  operate  a  real  suppression  of  thought 
in  the  spiritual  direction,  Dr.  Strauss  assumes  the  incredi- 
bility of  miracles,  without  much  care  for  the  argument, 
and  bases  on  that  assumption  his  deliberate  and  powerful 
assault  upon  the  gospel  history. 

Against  these  and  similar  modes  of  denial,  which  dis- 
tinguish the  naturalistic  tendencies  of  our  time,  we  now 
undertake,  assisted  by  the  material  already  prepared,  in 
the  preceding  chapters,  to  establish  the  fact  of  the  Chris- 
tian miracles.  Our  argument  will  not  prove  every  one 
of  them,  or,  in  fact,  any  particular  one ;  for  the  question 


MIEACLES    DEFINED.  335 

will  still  be  open,  for  such,  as  choose  to  engage  in  it, 
whether  this,  or  that,  or  some  of  them,  are  not  to  be  dis- 
credited for  particular  reasons,  which  display  the  mistake 
or  credulity  of  the  narrators.  We  shall  only  show  that 
Christ  wrought  miracles,  which  is  the  great  point  in  issue. 

Let  us  endeavor,  then,  first  of  all,  as  a  matter  on  which 
every  thing  depends,  to  settle  what  is  to  be  understood  by 
a  miracle,  or  what  a  miracle  is. 

We  have  raised  a  clear  distinction  already  between  na- 
ture and  the  supernatural ;  viz.,  that  nature  is  the  chain 
of  cause  and  effect — that  coming  to  pass  which  is  deter- 
mined by  the  laws  of  cause  and  effect  in  things.  The 
supernatural  is  that  which  acts  on  the  chain  of  cause  and 
effect,  from  without  the  chain ;  not  being  caused  in  its 
action,  but  acting  from  itself,  under  no  conditions  of  pre- 
vious causality.  The  distinction  of  nature  and  the  super- 
natural is  the  distinction,  in  fact,  between  propagations  of 
causality  and  original  causality,  between  things  and  powers. 
In  this  view,  man,  as  a  power,  together  with  all  created 
spirits,  good  and  bad,  is  a  supernatural  being  co-ordinate 
with  God,  in  so  far  as  he  acts  freely  and  morally.  If  he 
moves  but  a  limb  in  his  freedom,  he  acts  on  the  lines  of 
cause  and  effect  in  nature ;  and  if,  in  moving  that  limb, 
he  has  committed  a  murder,  we  blame  him  for  it,  and 
bring  him  to  a  felon's  punishment;  simply  because  he 
was  not  caused  to  do  the  deed,  by  any  efficient  cause  back 
of  him,  but  did  it  of  himself;  or,  as  the  common  law  has 
it,  "by  malice  aforethought." 

But  we  do  not  call  these  free  moral  actions  of  man, 
miracles,  because  .they  are  common,  and  because  there  is 
no  attribute  of  wonder  connected  with  them.  What  then 


386       THREE  ELEMENTS  INCLUDED. 

is  a  miracle?  It  is  a  supernatural  act,  an  act,  that  is, 
which  operates  on  the  chain  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature, 
from,  without  the  chain,  producing,  in  the  sphere  of  the 
senses,  some  event  that  moves  our  wonder,  and  evinces 
the  presence  of  a  more  than  human  power.  Observe 
three  points.  (1.)  It  is  by  some  action  upon,  not  in,  the 
line  of  cause  and  effect;  (2.)  it  is  in  the  sphere  of  the 
senses,  for,  though  the  regeneration  of  a  soul  may  require 
as  great  power  as  the  raising  of  Lazarus,  it  is  yet  no 
proper  miracle,  because  it  is  no  sign  to  the  senses ;  (3.)  it 
must  be  understood  to  evince  a  superhuman  power,  other- 
wise feats  of  jugglery  and  magic  would  be  miracles.  We 
commonly  suppose,  in  miracles,  a  deific  power,  though 
sometimes  we  refer  them  to  a  subordinate,  angelic,  or  de- 
moniacal power;  as  when  we  speak  of  signs  and  lying 
wonders,  that  are  wrought  by  no  divine  agency.  The 
word  miracle,  which  is  a  Latin  diminutive,  properly  de- 
notes some  limited  or  isolated  fact,  that  we  wonder  at.  It 
takes  the  diminutive  form  probably  because  it  relates  to 
something  parceled  off  from  the  whole  of  nature,  which, 
in  that  view,  is  small,  or  partial.  The  scripture  uses  sev- 
eral terms  or  names  to  denote  such  events,  calling  them 
"signs,"  "wonders,"  "powers;"  and  once,  irapa&>|a,  trans 
lated  "  strange  things." 

To  make  our  definition  yet  more  exact,  or  to  clear  it 
yet  farther  of  ambiguity,  let  us  add  the  following  nega- 
tives. 

1.  A  miracle  is  not,  as  our  definition  itself  implies,  any 
wonderful  event  developed  under  the  laws  of  nature,  or 
of  natural  causation.  Some  religious  teachers  have  taken 
this  ground,  suggesting  that  nature  was  originally  planned, 
or  preformed,  so  as  to  bring  out  these  particular  surprises, 


FOUR    MISCONCEPTIONS    CORRECTED.        337 

at  the  points  where  they  occur.  Doubtless  God's  original 
scheme,  taken  as  a  whole,  was  so  planned,  or  preformed; 
but  that  scheme  included  more  than  mere  nature,  viz.,  all 
supernatural  agencies  and  events,  and  even  his  own 
works,  or  actions,  in  the  higher,  vaster  field  of  the  super- 
natural. But  it  is  a  very  different  thing  to  imagine  that 
nature  is  every  thing,  and  that  the  surprises  are  all  devel- 
opments of  nature. 

2.  A  miracle  is  no  event  that  transpires  singly,  or  apart 
from  system ;  for  the  real  system  of  God  is  not  nature,  as 
we  have  seen,  but  that  vaster  whole  of  government  and 
order,  including  spirits,  of  which  nature  is  only  a  very 
subordinate  and  comparatively  insignificant  member.     In 
this  higher  view,  a  miracle  is  in  such  a  sense  part  of  the 
integral  system  of  God,  that  it  would  be  no  perfect  system 
without  the  miracle.     Hence  all  that  is  said  against  mira- 
cles, as  a  disruption  of  order  in  God's  kingdom — there- 
fore   incredible    and    dishonorable   to    God — is   without 
foundation. 

3.  A  miracle  is  no  contradiction  of  our  experience.     It 
is  only  an  event  that  exceeds  the  reach  of  our  experience. 
We  have  a  certain  experience  of  what  is  called  nature  and 
the  order  of  nature.     But  what  will  be  the  effect,  in  the 
field  of  nature,  when  the  supernatural  order  meets  it,  or 
streams  into  it,  we  can  not  tell;  our  experience  here  is 
limited  to  the  results  or  effects  that  may  be  wrought,  by 
our  own  supernatural  agency.     What  the  supernatural  di- 
vine, or  angelic,  or  demonic  agency  may  be  able  to  do  in 
it,  we  know  not.     Therefore,  all  that  is  alledged  by  Mr. 
Hume  falls  to  the  ground.     It  may  be  more  difficult  to 
believe,  or  more  difficult  to  prove  such  facts,  wrought  by 
such  agencies :  but  not  because  they  are  contrary,  in  any 

29 


338  ADMISSIONS    MADE 

proper  sense,  to  our  experience.     They  are  only  more 
strange  to  our  experience. 

4.  A  miracle  is  no  suspension,  or  violation,  of  the  laws 
of  nature.  Here  is  the  point  where  the  advocates  of 
miracles  have  so  fatally  weakened  their  cause  by  too  large 
a  statement.  The  laws  of  nature  are  subordinated  to  mir- 
acles, but  they  are  not  suspended,  or  discontinued  by  them. 
If  I  raise  my  arm,  I  subordinate  the  law  of  gravity  and  pro- 
duce a  result  against  the  force  of  gravity,  but  the  law,  or 
the  force,  is  not  discontinued.  On  the  contrary  it  is  act- 
ing still,  at  every  moment,  as  uniformly  as  if  it  held  the 
arm  to  its  place.  All  the  vital  agencies  maintain  a  chem- 
istry of  their  own,  that  subordinates  the  laws  of  inorganic 
chemistry.  Nothing  is  more  familiar  to  us,  than  the  fact 
of  a  subordination  of  natural  laws.  It  is  the  great  game 
of  life,  also,  to  conquer  nature  and  make  it  what,  of  it- 
self, by  its  own  laws  of  cause  and  effect,  it  is  not.  We 
raised  the  supposition,  on  a  former  occasion,  of  another 
physical  universe,  separated  from  the  existing  universe, 
and  placed  beyond  a  gulf,  across  which  no  one  effect 
ever  travels.  If  now  that  other  universe  were  swung  up 
side  by  side  with  this,  it  would  instantly  change  all  the 
action  of  this — not  by  suspending  its  laws,  but  by  an  ac- 
tion that  subordinates  and  varies  its  action.  So  the  realm 
of  spirits  is  a  realm  that  is  permitted,  or  empowered  to 
come  down  upon  this  other,  which  is  called  nature,  and 
play  its  activity  upon  it,  according  to  the  plan  God  has 
before  adjusted ;  but  this  activity  suspends  no  law,  breaks 
no  bond  of  system.  Nature  stands  fast,  with  all  her  terms 
of  cause  and  effect,  as  before,  a  constant  quantity,  inter- 
posed by  God  to  be  a  medium  between  supernatural 
beings,  in  their  relative  actions.  They  are  to  have  their 


BY  OPPOSERS  OF  MIRACLES.       339 

exercise  in  it,  and  upon  it,  and  so,  by  their  activity,  they 
are  to  make  a  moral  acquaintance  with  each  other;  men  with 
men,  all  created  spirits  with  all,  God  with  creatures,  creat- 
ures with  God ;  acquaintance  also  with  the  need  of  laws 
by  the  wrongs  they  suffer,  and  with  their  own  bad  mind 
by  seeing  what  wrongs  they  do — so  by  their  whole  ex- 
perience to  be  trained,  corrected,  assimilated  in  love,  and 
finished  in  holy  virtue.  There  is  no  more  a  suspen- 
sion of  the  laws  of  nature,  when  God  acts,  than  when  we 
do;  for  nature  is,  by  her  very  laws,  subjected  to  his  and 
our  uses,  to  be  swayed,  and  modified,  and  made  a  sign-lan- 
guage, so  to  speak,  of  mutual  acquaintance  between  us. 

By  these  four  negatives,  distinctly  premised,  we  seem 
to  have  cleared  the  faith  of  miracles  of  all  needless  incum- 
brances,  and,  in  that  way,  to  have  cut  off  the  principal  ob- 
jections urged  against  their  credibility.  Before  proceed- 
ing, however,  to  inquire  after  the  more  positive  proofs  of 
the  Christian  miracles,  it  may  be  well  to  glance  at  the  po- 
sitions taken,  by  some  of  the  principal  advocates  of  natu- 
ralism, and  especially  to  the  admissions  they  are  sometimes 
constrained  to  make. 

Thus  it  is  conceded  by  Mr.  Hennel  that — "It  seems  be- 
yond the  power  of  intellect  to  decide  a  priori,  whether 
a  miraculous  revelation,  or  instruction  through  nature 
alone,  be  more  suitable  to  the  character  of  God."*  There 
is  then  no  inherent  absurdity  in  the  supposition,  that  God, 
as  the  spring  of  scientific  unity  and  order  in  his  works, 
should  yet  perform  miracles.  Whatever  doubts  we  suffer 
of  their  reality  must  be  grounded  in  defects  of  historic 
evidence.  This  is  a  large  concession. 

*  Inquiry,  p.  96. 


340  ADMISSIONS    MADE 

Coincidently  with  this,  Mr.  Parker  admits,  that  "there 
is  no  antecedent  objection"  to  miracles,  if  only  they  are 
wrought  "  in  conformity  with  some  law  out  of  our  reach."* 
And  exactly  this  is  true  of  all  supernatural  divine  agency, 
as  we  have  abundantly  shown — only  the  laws  of  God's  su- 
pernatural agency  are  laws  of  reason,  or  such  as  respect 
his  last  end,  and  the  best  way  of  compassing  that  end ; 
which  laws  are  yet  so  stable  and  so  exactly  universal,  that 
he  will  always  do  exactly  the  same  things,  in  exactly  the 
same  circumstances  or  conditions. 

The  admissions  of  Dr.  Strauss  are  even  more  remark- 
able. We  have  already  referred  to  his  admission  that  one 
"kingdom  in  nature  may  intrench  on  another,"  and  that 
"human  freedom"  may,  in  this  way,  modify  "  natural  devel- 
opment.'^ Ask  the  question  accordingly,  wherein  is  it 
less  credible  that  the  freedom  of  God  may  do  as  much? 
and  we  have,  as  the  necessary  answer,  what  contains  the 
whole  doctrine  of  miracles.  Doubtless  it  will  be  added 
that  man  belongs  to  "the  totality  of  things"  and  that  God 
does  not;  that  man  is  in  "the  vast  circle"  of  nature  and 
natural  laws,  and  that  God  is  not.  But  the  answer,  we 
reply,  is  grounded  in  an  assumption,  as  regards  man,  that 
is  justified  by  no  evidence,  and  is  contradicted  even  by 
the  evidence  of  consciousness.  Man,  as  a  being  of  free 
will,  is  no  part  of  nature  at  all,  no  arc  in  the  circle  of  na- 
ture. He  belongs,  we  have  abundantly  shown,  to  a  high- 
er kingdom  and  order;  having  it  for  his  prime  distinction 
that  he  acts  supernaturally,  acts  upon  the  circle  of  nature 
from  without,  and  never  as  being  determined  by  the  caus- 
alities of  nature.  All  the  free  intelligences  of  the  uni- 

*  Discourses  of  Religion,  pp.  269-70.         f  life  of  Jesus,  Vol.  L,  p.  72 


BY  OPPOSEBS  OF  MIRACLES.       341 

verse  are  acting  on  the  circle  of  nature,  in  this  manner, 
and  why  then  may  not  God  Himself? 

But  we  have  another  concession  that  is  even  more  to 
our  purpose.  Adverting  to  the  fact  that  the  ancient  peo- 
ples, especially  of  the  East,  begin  at  God,  and  see  all 
changes  take  their  spring  in  his  immediate  agency,  while 
the  moderns  begin  at  things,  and  see  all  changes  come  to 
pass,  under  natural  laws,  he  distinctly  rejects  the  latter,  as 
being,  by  itself,  any  complete  and  sufficient  view  of  the 
subject.  "It  must  be  confessed,"  he  says,  "on  nearer  in- 
vestigation, that  this  modern  explanation,  although  it 
does  not  exactly  deny  the  existence  of  God,  yet  puts  aside 
the  idea  of  Him,  as  the  ancient  view  did  the  idea  of  the 
world.  For  this  is,  as  it  has  often  been  well  remarked, 
no  longer  a  God  and  Creator,  but  a  mere  finite  Artist,  who 
acts  immediately  upon  his  work,  only  during  its  first  pro- 
duction, and  then  leaves  it  to  itself;  who  becomes  exclud- 
ed with  his  full  energy  from  one  particular  sphere  of 
existence."* 

There  is  then,  he  admits,  no  validity  in  the  modern 
opinion,  which  assumes. that  all  things  take  place  by  force 
of  second  causes,  and  without  an  immediate  divine  agency. 
Indeed  he  explicitly  acknowledges,  on  the  next  page,  that 
"our  idea  of  God  requires  an  immediate,  and  our  idea  of 
the  world  a  mediate  divine  operation."  He  only  man- 
ages to  quite  take  away  the  value  of  the  admission,  by 
raising  the  question,  how  to  combine,  or  settle  the  relative 
adjustment  of  the  mediate  and  immediate  operation,  and  by 
so  conducting  the  process  as  to  come  out  in  the  conclusion, 
that  "God  acts  upon  the  world  as  a  whole,  immediately; 
but  on  each  part,  only  by  means  of  his  action  on  every 

Life  of  Jesus,  VoL  L,  p.  72. 
29* 


342  ADMISSIONS    MADE 

other  part,"  that  is  to  say,  "by  the  laws  of  nature."     And 
so  miracles  are  excluded. 

But  there  is  a  mistake  here,  first  in  his  premises,  and 
next  in  his  conclusion.  It  is  not  true  that  our  "idea  of 
the  world"  requires  us  to  hold  the  faith  of  a  merely  "me- 
diate" action  of  God  upon  it.  Exactly  contrary  to  this, 
the  idea  of  the  world,  taken  as  disordered  by  sin,  demands 
his  immediate  action.  It  is  not  only  necessary,  in  order  to 
realize  the  idea  of  God,  or  make  room  for  his  practical  ex- 
istence, that  we  conceive  him  to  have  some  kind  of  imme- 
diate action,  but  the  world,  under  its  disorders,  asks  for  it, 
and  waits  for  the  restoring  grace  of  it.  It  is  very  true 
that  if  the  world,  as  an  organized  frame  of  scientific  or- 
der, under  second  causes,  were  in  no  way  disturbed  by  our 
immediate  action  upon  it,  there  would  seem  to  be  no  de- 
mand or  even  place  for  an  immediate  operation  of  God. 
Why  should  the  watchmaker  turn  the  hands  of  his  watch 
directly  by  the  key,  when  he  has  made  them  to  go  mediate- 
ly by  the  spring?  But  this  is  not  any  true  statement  of  the 
question ;  the  world  is  in  no  such  state  of  primal  and  ideal 
order.  Making  due  account  of  sin,  as  our  philosophers, 
alas!  never  do,  we  have  a  condition  that,  for  order's  sake, 
asks  an  intervention  of  God's  supernatural  and  powerful 
hand.  The  world,  in  fact,  was  made,  including  man,  as  a 
thing  necessarily  unperfect;  made  to  want,  thus,  interven- 
tions and  immediate  operations,  to  carry  it  on  and  bring  it 
out,  in  the  final  realization  of  its  perfected  ends.  Even  as 
a  watch,  being  no  infallible  machine,  is  submitted  to  exter- 
nal action,  by  means  of  the  regulator;  and  as,  without  a 
regulator  prepared  for  the  immediate  touch  of  some  hand, 
it  would  be  no  manageable  or  serviceable  thing,  so  it  is  the 
particular  merit  of  nature,  that  it  is  originally  ordered  to 


BY  OPPOSERS  OF  MIRACLES.       343 

receive  the  touch  of  free-will  forces  from  without;  first  of 
such  as  are  human,  and  then,  as  the  only  sufficient  power 
of  conservation,  of  such  as  are  divine. 

The  error  referred  to,  in  the  conclusion  at  which  Dr. 
Strauss  arrives  in  his  analysis,  is  too  obvious  to  require  a 
particular  refutation.  Enough  that  any  one  but  a  mere 
words-man,  will  find  some  difficulty  in  conceiving  how 
God  should  act  "immediately  on  the  whole"  of  the  world, 
without  acting  immediately  on  some  one,  or  all  of  the 
parts.  Acting  in,  or  upon  some  one  wheel  of  a  watch, 
the  whole  action  of  the  watch  will  be  affected;  so  when 
every  wheel  is  acted  on;  but  what  is  that  immediate  ac- 
tion upon  the  whole  of  a  watch,  that  does  not  immediately 
act  on  any  one  of  the  parts?  Besides,  the  argument  by 
which  all  particular  action  is  excluded,  would  require 
that  God  should  never  have  begun  to  act  immediately 
any  where.  Creation  is  thus  philosophically  impossible. 
God,  therefore,  has  had  nothing  to  do,  but  to  be  chained 
to  the  wheel  from  eternity,  acting  immediately  on  some 
eternal  whole  that  is  self-existent  as  He;  allowed  to  be- 
gin nothing,  vary  no  part  or  particle,  held  by  a  doom 
to  his  eternal  totality.  Is  it  this  which  "the  idea  of 
God"  requires,  this  by  which  our  idea  of  God  is  fulfilled? 

On  this  particular  question,  however,  of  an  immediate 
and  a  mediate  divine  agency,  we  are  not  disposed  to  spend 
a  great  deal  of  time.  We  strongly  suspect  there  is  a 
sophism  in  the  question,  much  as  if  the  inquiry  were 
whether  God,  who  is  above  time,  acts  in  this  tense  or 
the  other?  All  that  we  can  say  with  confidence  on  this 
subject,  appears  to  be  that,  so  far  as  we  can  see,  it  is  nec- 
essary for  us,  under  conditions  of  time,  to  hold  the  two 
conceptions,  of  a  nature  set  on  foot  in  some  past  time, 


344  THE    MEDIATE    AND    IMMEDIATE, 

and  a  divine  force,  acting  supernaturally  upon  it  now; 
and  that  God  so  distributes  his  action  or  plan,  as  to  give 
us  what  will  thus  accommodate  our  finite  conditions. 
Nature,  practically  viewed  and  wholly  apart  from  specu- 
lation, is  a  kind  of  third  quantity  between  us  and  God,  to 
be  reciprocally  acted  on;  so  that  we  can  see  what  we  are 
doing  toward  Him,  and  what  he  is  doing  toward  us.  It 
is  words  to  the  great  life-talk  of  duty,  a  medium  of  ac- 
tion and  reaction  that  interprets  to  us  the  divine  relation- 
ship in  which  we  stand.  Laying  hold  of  nature  by  her  laws 
and  causes,  to  build,  produce,  possess,  and  also  to  frame  a 
scientific  knowledge,  we  get  a  footing  and  a  basis  of  re- 
action for  our  freedom.  If  we  descend  into  sin,  we  set 
the  causes  of  nature  in  courses  of  retributive  action,  and 
this  reveals  what  is  in  our  sin.  Then,  as  God  will  redeem 
us,  we  are  able  to  see  a  force  entered  into  nature,  which 
is  not  nature's  force.  One  may  be  as  truly  a  divine  force 
as  the  other,  but  they  are  yet  so  ordered  as  to  be  relative 
forces  to  our  apprehension,  acting  one  upon,  or  into,  the 
other.  In  all  Christian  experience,  and  in  times  of  pray- 
er, we  get  a  divine  help,  entered  into  our  state,  which  we 
apprehend  distinctly,  and  with  a  conscious  intelligence, 
as  we  could  not,  if  all  divine  agency  were  homogeneous. 
But  while  we  need,  so  manifestly,  to  think  God's  agency 
in  this  manner,  under  a  twofold  distribution,  it  is  by  no 
means  certain  that  he,  from  his  hight  of  eternity,  classi- 
fies his  action,  under  our  finite  categories  of  tense  and 
relative  casuality.  It  is  very  certain,  as  we  have  already 
shown,  that  nature  is  not,  to  Him,  the  universal  system. 
All  his  doings,  whether  past  or  present,  mediate  or  imme- 
diate, rest  in  laws  of  reason,  determined  by  his  end,  and 
it  is  in  these,  not  in  the  physical  laws  magnified  by  sc; 


POSSIBLY    A    HUMAN    DISTINCTION.         345 

ence,  that  lie  beholds  the  real  system  of  his  universe.  La 
this  view,  nature  may  be  to  him  a  kind  of  continuous 
creation,  coalescing,  as  it  flows  from  his  will,  in  a  com- 
mon stream  with  his  supernatural  action,  and  crystallizing 
with  it,  in  the  unity  of  his  end.  Enough  that,  to  us,  a 
conception  of  his  work  is  given,  which  better  meets  our 
finite  conditions.  Enough  that  we  may  call  it  natural  and 
supernatural ;  cause  and  effect,  and  miracle ;  mediate  and 
immediate;  and  that  so,  without  any  real  error,  we  may 
have  our  human  want  accommodated.  The  twofold  dis- 
tinction is  permitted  as  a  practically  valid  form  of  thought, 
without  which  we  could  have  no  sense  of  relationship 
with  God,  under  the  experience  of  life;  and,  without 
which,  nothing  done  by  him,  as  prior  to  our  sin,  in  the 
way  of  judicial  arrangement,  or  posterior,  in  the  way  of 
recovery,  could  ever  be  intelligible. 

Having  noted  some  of  the  admissions  of  the  natural- 
izing teachers,  we  will  now  proceed  to  adduce  some  proofs 
of  the  Christian  miracles;  or  rather  to  gather  up  the 
proofs  already  supplied,  by  the  course  of  our  argument 
itself. 

1.  We  have  seen  that  man  himself  acts  supernaturally, 
in  all  his  free  accountable  actions.  That  is,  he  acts  upon 
the  chain  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature,  uncaused  himself, 
in  his  action.  This  is  no  miracle,  but  it  involves  all  the 
speculative  difficulties  encountered  in  miracles.  These  are 
nothing  but  acts,  every  way  similar  to  ours,  of  God  or 
superhuman  agents,  on  the  lines  of  causes  in  nature ;  only 
different  in  effect  or  degree,  as  they  are  different  beings 
from  us.  We  have  only  to  suppose  that  nature  is,  by 
her  very  laws,  submitted  to  them  as  to  us,  and  that  is  the 


346  ARGUMENTS    FOR 

end  of  all  difficulty.  We  may  wonder  at  their  manifest- 
ations, and  not  at  our  own ;  but  our  wonder  alters  nothing, 
creates  no  derangement  of  nature,  any  more  than  if  we 
were  so  familiar  with  such  doings,  as  to  experience  no  won- 
der at  all.  If  the  sun  darkens,  or  the  earth  shudders 
with  Christ  in  his  death,  that  sympathy  of  nature  is  just 
as  appropriate  for  him,  as  it  is  for  us,  that  our  skin  should 
blush,  or  our  eye  distill  its  tears,  when  our  guilt  is  upon 
us,  or  our  repentances  dissolve  us.  It  is  not  cause 
and  effect  that  blushes,  or  that  weeps,  but  it  is  that 
cause  and  effect  are  touched  by  sentiments  which  connect 
with  our  freedom.  Nature  blushes  and  weeps,  because 
she  was  originally  submitted,  so  far,  to  our  freedom,  or 
made  to  be  touched  by  our  actions;  but  she  could  not  even 
to  eternity  raise  a  blush,  or  a  tear  of  contrition,  if  we  did 
not  command  her. 

2.  Consider  how  near  the  fact  of  sin,  which  is  the  act 
of  a  supernatural  human  agency,  approaches  to  the  rank 
of  a  miracle.  Sin,  as  we  have  shown  in  a  previous  chap- 
ter, is  the  acting  of  a  free  being  as  he  was  not  made  to  act ; 
for,  if  it  were  the  acting  of  a  being  under  laws  of  cause 
and  effect  established  by  God,  then  it  would  be  no  sin. 
God  made  sin  possible,  just  as  he  made  all  lying  wonders 
possible,  but  he  never  made  it  a  fact,  never  set  any  thing 
in  his  plan  to  harmonize  with  it.  Therefore  it  enters  the 
world  as  a  forbidden  fact,  against  every  thing  that  God 
has  ordained.  And  then  what  follows  ?  A  general  disrup- 
tion of  every  thing  that  belongs  to  the  original  paradisaic 
order  of  the  creation.  The  soul  itself  begins,  at  the  first 
moment,  to  feel  the  terrible  action  of  it,  and  becomes  a 
crazed  and  disordered  power.  The  crystal  form  of  the 
spirit  is  broken,  and  it  is  become  an  opaque  element,  a  liv- 


MIRACLES.  347 

ing  malformation.  The  conscience  is  battered  and  tram- 
pled in  its  throne.  The  successions  of  the  thoughts  are 
become  disorderly  and  wild ;  the  tempers  are  out  of  tune : 
the  passions  kindle  into  guilty  fires,  and  burn  with  a  con- 
suming heat ;  the  imagination  is  a  hell  of  painful,  ugly 
phantoms ;  the  body  a  diseased  thing,  scarred  by  deform- 
ity. Society  is  out  of  joint,  and  even  the  physical  world 
itself,  as  we  have  shown,  is  marred  in  every  part  by  abor- 
tions, deformities  visible,  and  discords  audible,  so  as  no 
more  to  represent  the  perfect  beauty  of  its  author.  What 
devil  now  of  confusion  has  thrown  a  magnificent  creature, 
and  a  realm  of  glorious  natural  order,  into  so  great  confu- 
sion? Where  are  those  sovereign  laws  of  beauty  and 
order  which  they  tell  us  nothing  can  disturb  ?  We  care 
not  to  call  sin  a  miracle.  We  only  say  that  no  one  mira- 
cle, nor  all  miracles,  ever  heard  of  or  reported,  can  be  im- 
agined to  have  wrought  a  thousandth  part  of  the  disturb- 
ance actually  wrought  by  sin,  the  sin  of  mankind.  Who- 
ever then  has  yielded  to  the  really  shallow  dogma  of  ra- 
tionalism, which  teaches  that  cause  and  effect  in  nature  must 
have  their  way,  fulfilling  causes  of  ideal  harmony,  and 
forever  excluding  the  possibility  of  a  miracle,  need,  not  go 
far  to  find  a  corrective.  Let  it  be  distinctly  noted  then — 
3.  That  what  we  call  nature,  and  what  the  mere  natu- 
ralists are  so  bold  to  assume  can  not  be  mended  or  altered 
by  any  interference  of  miracle,  does  in  fact  no  longer  ex- 
ist. Sin  has  so  far  unmade  the  world  that  the  divine  order 
is  broken.  The  laws  are  all  in  action  as  at  the  first,  never 
discontinued,  or  annihilated,  but  the  false  fact  or  lying 
wonder  of  sin,  has  made  false  conjunctions  of  causes,  and 
set  the  currents  of  causality  in  a  kind  of  malign  activity, 
which  displaces  forever  the  proper  order  of  nature.  It  is 


348  ARGUMENTS    FOR 

with  nature  as  with  a  watch  in  which  some  wheel  has 
been  made  eccentric,  in  its  motions,  by  abuse.  The  whole 
machine  is  in  disorder,  though  no  one  part  is  wanting.  It 
is  no  longer  a  watch,  or  time-keeper,  but  a  jumble  of  use- 
less and  absurd  motions.  So  nature,  under  sin,  is  no  lon- 
ger nature,  but  a  condition  of  unnature.  Yet  this  it 
is  that  our  scientific  naturalism  assumes  to  be  the  perfect 
order ;  which  not  even  God  may  touch  by  a  miracle,  with- 
out a  breach  of  its  integrity!  It  is  nature,  they  say, 
and  God,  who  is  the  God  of  nature,  will  not,  can  not 
touch  it,  without  either  consenting  to  its  original  im- 
perfection, or  producing  a  general  wreck  of  its  perfection. 
Why,  the  perfection  of  it  is  gone  long  ages  ago !  From 
the  moment,  when  a  substance  or  power  located  in  it,  viz. 
man,  began  to  act  as  he  was  not  made  to  act,  that  is  to  sin, 
it  has  been  a  disordered  fabric  of  necessity.  No  longer 
does  it  represent  only  the  beautiful  mind  of  its  author,  but 
quite  as  often  the  shame,  and  discord,  and  deformity  con- 
sequent upon  sin.  And  no  man,  we  are  sure,  who  regards 
it  for  a  moment,  will  have  any  the  least  apprehension  that 
a  miracle  wrought  in  it,  by  its  author,  can  be  any  thing 
but  a  hopeful  sign  for  its  systematic  integrity.  That  he 
would  never  work  a  miracle  in  nature  proper,  as  it  came 
from  his  hands,  we  are  quite  willing  to  admit,  but  since 
nature  is  gone,  fallen  with  man  in  the  bad  experiment  of 
evil,  and  since  it  was  originally  designed  to  be  acted  on, 
both  by  man  and  by  Himself,  in  a  process  of  training  that 
carries  him  through  a  fell,  and  brings  him  out  in  redemp- 
tion, we  see  nothing  to  discourage  the  faith  of  miracles, 
but  much  to  prove  the  contrary.  This  brings  us  to 
speak — 

4.  Of  the  fact  that,  without  a  putting  forth  of  the  di- 


MIRACLES.  349 

vine  power,  in  some  action  sovereign  as  miracle,  there 
can  be  no  reconstruction  of  the  proper  order  of  na- 
ture, no  recovery  of  the  broken  state  of  man.  The  laws 
of  nature,  without  him  and  within,  are  now  running  per- 
versely, as  laws  of  sin  and  death.  The  crystalline  order 
of  souls  and  of  the  world  is  broken,  and  it  is  plain,  at 
a  glance,  that  no  being  but  God,  the  Almighty,  can  avail 
to  restore  the  disturbance.  The  laws  have  no  power  of 
self-rectification,  any  more  than  the  laws  of  a  disordered 
machine  have  power  to  cure  the  disorder  by  running.  As 
certainly  therefore  as  sinners  are  to  be  restored,  as  certain- 
ly, that  is,  as  that  all  God's  ends  in  the  world  and  human 
existence  are  not  to  fail,  there  will  be,  must  be,  miracles, 
or  puttings  forth,  at  least,  of  a  divinely  supernatural 
power.  Every  thing  in  the  whole  creation  is  groaning  and 
travailing  in  expectation  of  so  great  a  redemption.  The 
very  plan  was  originally,  as  we  have  shown,  to  bring  out 
the  grand  results  of  spiritual  order  and  character  intended, 
by  means  of  a  double  administration ;  that  is  by  the  crea- 
tion and  the  new-creation,  the  creation  disordered  by  sin, 
the  new-creation  raised  up  and  glorified  by  grace  and  its 
miracles.  Go  back  then  a  moment — 

5.  To  things  precedent  and  see  what  considerations  and 
facts  may  be  gathered  there.  First,  we  discover,  what  the 
naturalists  and  men  chiefly  occupied  with  matters  of  sci- 
ence so  generally  overlook,  the  fact  that  nature  never  was, 
and  never  was  designed  to  be,  the  whole  empire  of  God ; 
that  the  final  ends  of  God  are  not  contained  in  nature  at 
all,  and  that  it  was  appointed  by  Him  to  be  only  a  means 
to  his  ends,  a  mere  field  for  the  training  of  his  children. 
In  this  view  spiritual  creatures,  creatures  supernatural,  com- 
pose the  real  body  and  substance  of  his  empire,  and  to  these 

30 


350  AEGUMENTS    FOB 

nature  was  to  be  subjected,  by  these  to  be  played  upon  in 
the  great  life-battle  of  their  trial — disordered  by  them  and 
restored  by  Himself.  Accordingly  it  is  not  implied  that 
the  divine  system  is,  in  any  degree,  marred  or  broken  by 
his  miracles.  On  the  contrary,  every  thing  done  by  Him, 
will  be  done  as  fulfilling  that  system.  There  is  no  change, 
no  reconsideration,  no  breach  of  unity,  but  a  doing  of  pre- 
cisely that  which  was  set  down  to  be  done  at  the  first.  He 
proceeds,  in  fact,  by  laws  predetermined,  in  his  miracles 
themselves ;  of  course  by  a  perfect  and  orderly  system. 

Observe,  again,  the  fact  that  God  has  either  never  done 
or  can  do  any  thing,  or  else  that  he  may  as  well  be  sup- 
posed to  do  a  miracle  now.  To  create  any  thing  that  was 
not,  to  set  any  plan  on  foot  that  was  not  on  foot,  was  itself 
a  miracle  that  involved  all  the  difficulties  of  a  miracle  sub- 
sequent. To  create  a  scheme  called  nature  and  retire  to 
see  it  run,  is  itself  a  miracle,  and  we  may  just  as  well  sup- 
pose that  he  continues  to  work,  as  that  he  so  began.  He 
has  either  never  done  any  thing,  or  else  he  may  do  some 
thing  now.  There  is  no  way  to  escape  the  faith  of  mira 
cles  and  hold  the  faith  of  a  personal  God  and  Creator.  It 
is  only  pantheism,  or,  what  is  not  far  different,  atheism, 
that  can  rationally  and  consistently  maintain  the  impossi- 
bility of  miracles.  Any  religion  too  absolute  to  allow  the 
faith  of  miracles,  is  a  religion  whose  (rod  never  did  any 
thing,  and  is  therefore  no  God. 

Again,  it  is  discovered  and  proved,  by  science  itself, 
that  God  has  performed,  at  least,  one  miracle,  or  class  of 
miracles,  in  the  world,  previous  to  the  date  of  human 
existence.  We  speak  of  the  great  geological  discovery 
that  new  races  of  animals  and  plants  have,  at  different 
times,  been  created,  and  finally  man  himself.  The  mere 


MIRACLES.  351 

metallic  earth,  which,  at  one  time,  was  the  all  of  nature, 
did  not  make  or  sprout  up  into  any  form  of  life.  That 
would  be  a  greater  miracle,  done  by  nature,  than  the  rais- 
ing of  Lazarus — as  great  as  if  the  earth  had  raised  him, 
yea,  as  great  as  if  the  earth  had  invented  and  shaped  him, 
and  breathed  intelligence  into  him.  Here  then  is  proved 
to  us,  out  of  the  infallible  registers  of  the  rocks,  that  God 
has  sometime  wrought  a  miracle  upon  nature.  And,  as 
we  said  just  now,  one  miracle  proved,  decides  the  ques- 
tion ;  for  there  may  as  well  be  a  thousand  as  one.  We 
pass  now — 

6.  To  the  subject  of  our  last  chapter,  where  we  meet  a 
proof  that  concludes  all  argument.  We  there  showed, 
by  a  full  and  critical  examination  of  the  character  of 
Jesus,  that  he  is  plainly  not  a  human  character,  and  can 
not  be  rightly  classed  in  the  genus  humanity ;  also,  that 
the  character  is  not  an  invention,  but  that  such  a  person 
must  have  lived,  else  he  could  not  be  described ;  also,  that 
being  such,  in  external  description,  he  must  have  been, 
what  he  himself  claimed  to  be,  a  sinless  being.  Here, 
then,  is  a  being  who  has  broken  into  the  world,  and  is  not 
of  it ;  one  who  has  come  out  from  God,  and  is  even  an  ex- 
pression to  us  of  the  complete  beauty  of  God — such  as 
he  should  be,  if  he  actually  was,  what  he  is  affirmed  to 
be,  the  Eternal  Word  of  the  Father  incarnate.  Did  he 
work  miracles?  this  now  is  the  question  that  waits  for 
our  decision — did  he  work  miracles  ?  By  the  supposition, 
he  is  superhuman.  By  the  supposition,  too,  he  is  in  the 
world  as  a  miracle.  Agreeing  that  the  laws  of  nature 
will  not  be  suspended,  any  more  than  they  are  by  our 
own  supernatural  action,  will  they  yet  be  so  subordinated 
to  his  power,  as  to  permit  the  performance  of  signs  and 


352  THE    GRAND    ARGUMENT, 

wonders,  in  which  we  may  recognize  a  superhuman  force? 
Since  he  is  shown  to  be  a  superhuman  being,  manifestly 
nature  will  have  a  relation  to  him,  under  and  by  her  own 
laws,  such  as  accords  with  his  superhuman  quality,  and  it 
will  be  very  singular  if  he  does  not  do  superhuman 
things ;  nay,  it  is  even  philosophically  incredible  that  he 
should  not.  An  organ  is  a  certain  instrument,  curiously 
framed  or  adjusted  in  its  parts,  and  prepared  to  yield 
itself  to  any  force  which  touches  the  keys.  An  animal 
runs  back  and  forth  across  the  key-board,  and  produces  a 
jarring,  disagreeable  jumble  of  sounds.  Thereupon  he 
begins  to  reason,  and  convinces  himself  that  it  is  the  na- 
ture of  the  instrument  to  make  such  sounds,  and  no  other. 
But  a  skillful  player  comes  to  the  instrument,  as  a  higher 
presence,  endowed  with  a  super-animal  sense  and  skill. 
He  strikes  the  keys,  and  all-melodious  and  heavenly 
sounds  roll  out  upon  the  enchanted  air.  Will  the  animal 
now  go  on  to  reason  that  this  is  impossible,  incredible, 
because  it  violates  the  nature  of  the  instrument,  and  is 
contrary  to  his  own  experience  ?  Perhaps  he  may,  and 
men  ra&j  sometimes  not  be  wiser  than  he.  But  the  player 
himself,  and  all  that  can  think  it  possible  for  him  to  do 
what  the  animal  can  not,  will  have  no  doubt  that  the 
music  is  made  by  the  same  laws  that  made  the  jargon. 
Just  so  Christ,  to  whose  will  or  touch  our  mundane  sys- 
tem is  pliant  as  to  ours,  may  be  able  to  execute  results 
through  its  very  laws,  subordinated  to  him,  which  to  us 
are  impossible.  Nay,  it  would  be  itself  a  contradiction 
of  all  order  and  fit  relation,  if  he  could  not.  To  suppose 
that  a  being  out  of  humanity  will  be  shut  up  within  all 
the  limitations  of  humanity,  is  incredible  and  contrary  to 
reason.  The  very  laws  of  nature  themselves,  having  him 


THAT    CHRIST    IS    A    MIRACLE.  353 

present  to  them,  as  a  new  agent  and  higher  first  term, 
would  require  the  development  of  new  consequences  and 
incidents  in  the  nature  of  wonders.  Being  a  miracle  him- 
self, it  would  be  the  greatest  of  all  miracles  if  he  did  not 
work  miracles. 

Let  it  be  farther  noted,  as  a  consideration  important  to 
the  argument,  that  Christ  is  here  on  an  errand  high 
enough  to  justify  his  appearing,  and  also  of  a  nature  to 
exclude  any  suspicion  that  he  is  going  to  overthrow  the 
order  of  God's  works.  He  declares  that  he  has  come  out 
from  God,  to  be  a  restorer  of  sin,  a  regenerator  of  all 
things,  a  new  moral  creator  of  the  world ;  thus  to  do  a 
work  that  is,  at  once,  the  hope  of  all  order,  and  the 
greatest  of  all  miracles.  Were  he  simply  juggling  with 
our  curiosity,  in  the  performance  of  idle  and  useless  won- 
ders, doing  it  for  money,  or  to  show  what  is  of  no  conse- 
quence ;  as  that  he  is  a  priest,  or  has  the  power  of  second 
sight,  or  that  the  sun  shines,  or  that  he  is  right  in  assert- 
ing some  insignificant  opinion,  it  is  allowed  that  we 
should  have  no  right  to  believe  in  him.  But  he  tells  us, 
on  the  contrary,  that  he  is  come  out  from  God,  to  set  up 
the  kingdom  of  God,  and  fulfill  the  highest  ends  of  the 
divine  goodness  in  the  creation  of  the  world  itself;  and 
the  dignity  of  his  work,  certified  by  the  dignity  also  of 
his  character,  sets  all  things  in  proportion,  and  commends 
him  to  our  confidence  in  all  the  wonders  he  performs. 

But  our  human  supernatural  action,  it  will  be  suggested, 
is  through  the  body,  while  the  raising  of  Lazarus  dis- 
penses with  all  natural  media  and  instruments.  And  yet, 
as  our  body  is  a  part  of  nature,  it  will  be  seen  that  we  act 
upon  the  body  as  being  itself  nature,  without  media  be- 
tween it  and  our  will,  in  the  same  manner.  The  relation- 

30* 


354  AND   OUGHT    THEREFORE 

ship  existing  between  different  orders  of  being  and  natuio, 
may  also  vary  according  to  their  degree.  On  this  subject 
we  know  nothing.  We  can  not  even  say,  that,  to  such  a 
being  as  Christ  incarnate  in  it,  the  whole  realm  of  physi- 
cal existence  was  not  present  as  a  sensorium,  quickened 
by  his  life.  Mere  ignorance  is  not  competent  here  to  hold 
an  objection.  If  we  can  not  see  how  Christ  could  work 
his  miracles,  or  send  his  will  into  things  around  him, 
there  is  nothing  singular  in  the  fact.  There  are  many 
things  that  we  can  not  understand. 

Nor  shall  we  apprehend  in  his  miracles  any  disruption 
of  law ;  for  we  shall  see  that  he  is  executing  that  true 
system,  above  nature  and  more  comprehensive,  which  is 
itself  the  basis  of  all  stability,  and  contains  the  real  im- 
port of  all  things.  Dwelling  from  eternity  in  this  higher 
system  himself,  and  having  it  centered  in  his  person, 
wheeling  and  subordinating  thus  all  physical  instruments, 
as  doubtless  he  may,  to  serve  those  better  ends  in  which 
all  order  lies,  it  will  not  be  in  us,  when  he  comes  forth 
from  the  Father,  on  the  Father's  errand,  to  forbid  that  he 
shall  work  in  the  prerogatives  of  the  Father.  Visibly  not 
one  of  us,  but  a  visitant  who  has  come  out  from  a  realm 
of  spiritual  majesty,  back  of  the  sensuous  orb  on  which 
our  moth-eyes  dwell  as  in  congenial  dimness  and  obscurity 
of  light,  what  shall  we  think  when  we  see  diseases  fly 
before  him,  and  blindness  letting  fall  the  scales  of  ob- 
scured vision,  and  death  retreating  from  its  prey,  but  that 
the  seeming  disruption  of  our  retributive  state  under  sin, 
is  made  to  let  in  mercy  and  order  from  above.  For,  if 
man  has  buried  himself  in  sense,  and  married  all  sense  to 
sin,  which  sin  is  itself  the  soul  of  all  disorder,  can  it  be 
to  us  a  frightful  thing  that  he  lays  his  hand  upon  the  per- 


TO    WORK    MIRACLES.  355 

verted  causalities,  and  says,  "them  art  made  whole?"  If 
the  bad  empire,  the  bitter  unnature,  of  our  sin,  is  some- 
where touched  by  his  healing  power,  must  we  apprehend 
some  fatal  shock  of  disorder?  If,  by  his  miraculous 
force,  some  crevice  is  made  in  the  senses,  to  let  in  the 
light  of  heaven's  peace  and  order,  must  we  tremble  lest 
the  scientific  laws  are  shaken,  and  the  scientific  causes 
violated  ?  Better  is  it  to  say — "  this  beginning  of  miracles 
did  Jesus  make  in  Galilee,  and  manifested  forth  his  glory, 
and  we  believe  in  him."  Glory  breaks  in  through  his 
incarnate  person,  to  chase  away  the  darkness.  In  him, 
peace  and  order  descend  to  rebuild  the  realm  below,  they 
have  maintained  above.  Sin,  the  damned  miracle  and 
misery  of  the  groaning  creation,  yields  to  the  stronger 
miracle  of  Jesus  and  his  works,  and  the  great  good  minds 
of  this  and  the  upper  worlds  behold  integrity  and  rest 
returning,  and  the  peace  of  universal  empire  secure.  Out 
of  the  disorder  that  was,  rises  order ;  out  of  chaos,  beauty. 
Amen !  Alleluia !  for  the  Lord  God  omnipotent  reigneth ! 
Once  more,  it  is  a  powerful  evidence  for  the  historic 
verity  of  the  Christian  miracles,  that  their  deniers  can 
make  no  account  of  them,  as  reported  in  the  Christian  nar- 
ratives, which  is  rational  or  even  credible.  Dr.  Strauss 
maintains  that  they  are  myths  or  legendary  tales,  that 
grew  up  out  of  the  story-telling  and  marveling  habit  of 
the  disciples  of  Christ,  within  the  first  thirty  years  after 
their  Master's  death,  at  which  time  many  of  the  eye-wit- 
nesses of  the  miracles  were  still  living.  That  such  a  con- 
version of  history  into  fable  should  have  taken  place  in 
the  traditions  of  a  much  longer  period  of  time,  is  not  im- 
possible. But  he  is  compelled  to  shorten  his  time  in  this 
manner,  as  it  would  seem,  because  there  is  no  allusion 


356  NO     OTHER    ACCOUNT 

made  in  the  gospels  to  the  fall  of  Jerusalem  as  an  accom- 
plished fact.  For,  had  they  been  written  after  the  over- 
throw by  Titus,  it  is  inconceivable  that  his  name  should 
not  have  been  mentioned  in  those  chapters  of  the  gospels 
that  foretell  the  overthrow,  and  also  that  the  shocking 
scenes  of  the  siege,  should  not  have  been  even  too  distinctly 
described.  On  the  supposition,  too,  that  the  first  age  of 
discipleship  was  fertile  enough  in  the  mythical  tendency,  to 
have  generated  so  many  miraculous  stories,  within  the  short 
period  of  thirty  years,  this  grand  catastrophe  of  the  na- 
tion must  have  been  set  off  with  a  profuse  garnish  of 
fictions,  and  Christ  himself,  coming  in  the  clouds  of  heaven 
to  be  the  avenger  of  the  cross,  must  have  had  such  prom- 
inence in  the  transaction,  as  to  quite  leave  the  Eoman 
commander  in  the  shade.  Hence  the  necessity  that  so 
short  a  time  should  be  fixed.  And  thus  we  are  required 
to  believe  that  all  these  myths  were  developed  and  re- 
corded in  the  lifetime  of  the  eye-witnesses  of  Christ's 
ministry,  and  some  of  them  recorded  by  eye-witnesses 
themselves.  The  faith  of  miracles,  we  think,  would  be 
somewhat  easier  than  this.  And  still  the  difficulty  is 
farther  increased  by  the  fact  that  the  epistles,  the  genuine- 
ness of  which  is  indisputable,  present  exactly  the  same 
Christ,  and  refer  to  the  same  miracles,  in  a  manner  clear 
of  all  pretense  of  myth  or  extravagance. 

But  the  mythologic  hypothesis  of  this  critic  breaks 
down  more  fatally,  if  possible,  in  the  necessary  implica- 
tion, that  four  common  men  are  able  to  preserve  such  a 
character  as  that  of  Christ,  while  loading  down  the  history 
thus,  with  so  many  mythical  wonders  that  are  the  garb  of 
their  very  grotesque  and  childish  credulity.  By  what 
accident,  we  are  compelled  to  ask,  was  an  age  of  myths 


OF    THE    MIRACLES  357 

and  fables  able  to  develop  and  set  forth  the  only  concep- 
tion of  a  perfect  character  ever  known  in  our  world? 
Were  these  four  mythologic  dreamers,  believing  their 
own  dreams  and  all  others  beside,  the  men  to  produce  the 
perfect  character  of  Jesus  and  a  system  of  teachings  that 
transcend  all  other  teachings  ever  given  to  the  race  ?  If 
there  be  a  greater  miracle,  or  a  tax  on  human  credulity 
more  severe,  we  know  not  where  it  is.  Nothing  is  so  dif- 
ficult, all  human  literature  testifies,  as  to  draw  a  character, 
and  keep  it  in  its  living  proportions.  How  much  more  to 
draw  a  perfect  character,  and  not  discolor  it  fatally  by 
marks  from  the  imperfection  of  the  biographer.  How  is 
it,  then,  that  four  humble  men,  in  an  age  of  marvels  and 
Rabbinical  exaggerations,  have  done  it — done  what  none, 
not  even  the  wisest  and  greatest  of  mankind,  have  ever 
been  able  to  do? 

So  far,  even  Mr.  Parker  concedes  the  right  of  my  argu- 
ment. "  Measure,"  he  says,  "  the  religious  doctrine  of 
Jesus  by  that  of  the  time  and  place  he  lived  in,  or  that 
of  any  time  and  any  place.  Yes,  by  the  doctrine  of  eter- 
nal truth.  Consider  what  a  work  his  words  and  deeds 
have  wrought  in  the  world.  Remember  that  the  greatest 
minds  have  seen  no  farther,  and  added  nothing  to  the  doc- 
trine of  religion;  that  the  richest  hearts  have  felt  no 
deeper,  and  added  nothing  to  the  sentiment  of  religion; 
have  set  no  loftier  aim,  no  truer  method  than  his,  of  per- 
fect love  to  God  and  man.  Measure  him  by  the  shadow 
he  has  cast  into  the  world — no,  by  the  light  he  has  shed 
upon  it.  Shall  we  be  told  such  a  man  never  lived  ?  the 
whole  story  is  a  lie  ?  Suppose  that  Plato  and  Newton 
never  lived.  But  who  did  their  wonders,  and  thought 
their  thought  ?  It  takes  a  Newton  to  forge  a  Newtcn. 


IS   TENABLE. 

What  man  could  have  fabricated  a  Jesus  ?     None  but  a 
Jesus."* 

Exactly  so.  And  yet,  in  the  middle  of  the  very  para- 
graph (from  which  these  words  are  gleaned,  Mr.  Parker 
says,  "  "We  can  learn  few  facts  about  Jesus ; "  also,  that  in 
certain  things — to  wit,  his  miracles,  we  suppose — "  Hercules 
was  his  equal,  and  Vishnu  his  superior."  Few  facts  about 
Jesus !  all  the  miracles  recited  of  him,  as  destitute  of  cred- 
ibility as  the  stories  of  Hercules  and  Vishnu !  And  yet 
these  evangelists,  retailing  so  many  absurd  fictions  and  so 
much  childish  gossip,  have  been  able  to  give  us  a  doctrine 
upon  which  the  world  has  never  advanced,  a  character  so 
deep  that  the  richest  hearts  have  felt  nothing  deeper,  and 
added  nothing  to  the  sentiment  of  it.  They  have  done, 
that  is,  the  difficult  thing,  and  broken  down  under  the 
easy !  preserved,  in  the  life  and  discourses  of  Jesus,  what 
exceeds  all  human  philosophy,  all  mortal  beauty,  and  yet 
have  not  been  able  to  recite  the  simplest  facts !  Is  it  so 
that  any  intelligent  critic  will  reason?  Suppose,  if  it 
please,  that  they  are  not  infallible  in  their  narrative,  for 
we  have  not  proved  them  to  be.  Still,  as  we  would  trust  a 
carrier  who  has  brought  us  a  case  of  the  rarest  diamonds, 
set  in  the  frailest  and  most  delicate  tissues,  proving  at 
once  his  capacity  and  his  honest  fidelity  to  his  trust,  so 
much  more  will  we  trust  these  simple  men,  who  have 
given  us  the  perfect  life  of  Jesus,  discolored  by  no  stain 
from  their  own  fond  prejudices  and  weaker  infirmities. 
Nor,  if  this  carrier  may  have  once  stumbled  at  our 
door,  when  bringing  us  some  bundle  of  meaner  con- 
sequence, do  we  set  him  down,  after  bringing  us  the 
casket  safely,  as  one  wlro  is  unreliable  in  these  common 

*  Life  of  Jesus,  p.  363. 


OBJECTIONS    CONSIDERED.  859 

errands.  No  more  can  we  set  down  our  evangelists,  as 
unreliable  in  matters  of  fact,  after  they  have  brought  us 
the  glorious,  self-evidencing  character  of  Jesus,  even 
though,  to  suppose  the  worst,  they  should  be  suspected, 
once  or  twice,  of  mistake,  in  the  external  facts  of  his 
ministry.  But  there  are  objections  to  be  considered. 

First  objection.  That  if  the  miracles  of  Christ  are  to 
be  believed,  why  not  those  also  of  Hercules  and  Vishnu, 
and  the  ecclesiastical  miracles  of  the  Papal  church  ?  Un- 
doubtedly they  must  be,  if  they  are  wrought  by  such  a 
character  as  Jesus,  engaged  in  such  a  work.  But  it  is 
rather  too  much  to  insist  that,  because  we  take  good 
money,  we  ought  therefore  in  consistency  to  take  counter- 
feit money.  If  it  be  said  that  the  Popish  miracles  are  as 
well  attested  as  those  of  Jesus,  we  have  made  nothing  at 
all,  let  it  be  observed,  of  the  mere  testimony  of  witnesses. 
We  have  proved  the  witnesses  by  that  which  stands  in 
glorious  self-evidence  before  us,  and  not  the  miracles  by 
the  mere  testimony  of  the  witnesses.  We  will  believe 
the  miracles  also  of  Hercules,  when  Hercules  is  seen,  by 
the  holy  beauty  of  his  perfect  character,  to  have  certainly 
come  out  from  God.  So,  too,  we  might  well  enough 
agree  to  believe  the  miracles  of  the  apocryphal  gospels, 
that,  for  example,  of  the  Infancy  of  Jesus,  could  the 
writer  only  manage  to  give  us  the  character  of  that  in- 
fancy, without  reducing  it  to  a  disgusting  picture  of  pet- 
tishness  and  passion.  Until  then,  we  must  discover,  in 
what  is  called  his  gospel,  how  certain  it  is  that  the  pen 
which  gives  us  only  myths  and  marvels,  for  the  facts  of  a 
perfect  history,  will  give  us,  for  a  perfect  character,  what  is 
wilder  still  and  more  absurd. 


360  OBJECTIONS    CONSIDERED. 

Second  objection.  That,  according  to  our  definition, 
there  may  be  false  miracles.  That  is  certainly  the  doc- 
trine of  scripture.  Neither  is  there  any  thing  essentially 
incredible  in  it.  They  are  wrought,  of  course,  by  no  con- 
currence of  divine  power,  but  only  by  such  power  -as  be- 
longs to  the  grade  of  the  spirit  by  whom  they  are 
wrought — by  "  him  whose  coming  is  with  signs  and  lying 
wonders,"  "by  the  spirits  of  devils,  working  miracles." 
According  to  our  definition,  any  invisible  spirit,  who  can 
do  what  is  superhuman,  can  do  a  miracle.  That  there  are 
invisible  spirits,  we  have  no  doubt,  and  what  kind  of  ac- 
cess they  may  have  to  nature,  in  what  manner  qualified 
or  restrained,  we  do  not  know.  But  it  will  never  be  diffi- 
cult to  distinguish  their  prodigies  and  freaks  of  mischief 
from  any  divine  operation.  Their  character  will  be  evi- 
dent in  their  works,  and  no  one  that  loves  the  divine  truth 
will  ever  be  taken  by  their  impostures.  We  express  no 
opinion  of  the  utterances  and  other  demonstrations  which 
many  are  accepting  in  our  times,  as  the  effusions  of  spirits 
— they  are  beyond  our  range  of  acquaintance.  We  say 
that  if  these  things  are  really  done,  or  communicated,  by 
spirits,  then  they  are  miracles,  bad  miracles,  of  course; 
and  thus  we  have  it  established  as  a  curious  phenomenon, 
that  the  men  who  are  boasting  their  rejection  of  all  divine 
miracles,  are  themselves  deepest  in  the  faith  of  those 
which  are  wrought  by  demons.  Nor  is  it  impossible  that 
God  has  suffered  this  late  irruption  of  lying  spirits,  to  be 
at  once  the  punishment  and  the  rectification  of  that  shal- 
low unbelief  which  distinguishes  our  age — thus  to  shame 
the  absurd  folly  of  what  is  here  called  science,  and  bring 
us  back  to  a  true  faith  in  the  spiritual  realities  and  powers 
of  a  supernatural  kingdom. 


OBJECTIONS    CONSIDERED.  361 

Third  objection.  That  if  miracles  are  credible  in  any 
particular  time  or  age,  that,  for  example,  of  the  New  Tes- 
tament, they  must  be  now  and  always  credible.  To  this 
we  answer  that  they  are  now  and  always  credible.  But  it 
does  not  follow  that  they  are  now  and  always  a  fact. 
That  must  depend  upon  historic  evidence.  The  scriptures 
nowhere  teach,  what  is  often  assumed,  the  final  discontinu- 
ance of  miracles,  and  it  is  much  to  be  regretted  that  such 
an  assumption  is  so  commonly  made,  for  when  it  is  taken 
for  an  authorized  doctrine,  that  God  will  no  more  allow 
any  real  miracle  to  be  wrought,  since  the  apostolic  times, 
it  renders  even  the  New  Testament  miracles  just  so  much 
more  difficult  to  be  believed.  There  is  no  certain  proof 
that  miracles  have  not  been  wrought  in  every  age  of  the 
Christian  church.  There  is  certainly  a  supernatural  and 
divine  causality  streaming  into  the  lives  and  blending 
with  the  faith  of  all  good  men,  and  there  is  no  reason  to 
doubt  that  it  may  sometimes  issue  in  premonitions,  results 
of  guidance  and  healing,  endowments  of  force,  answers  to 
prayer  that  closely  approach,  in  many  cases,  if  they  do  not 
exactly  meet,  our  definition  of  miracles. 

We  answer  again  that  if  miracles  have  been  discontin- 
ued, even  for  a  thousand  years,  they  may  yet  be  revived 
in  such  varieties  of  form,  as  a  different  age  may  re- 
quire. They  will  be  revived  without  fail,  whenever  the 
ancient  reason  may  return,  or  any  new  contingency  may 
occur,  demanding  their  instrumentality. 

And  yet,  again,  we  answer  that  there  may  have  been 
good  and  sufficient  reasons  why  the  more  palpable  mira- 
cles of  the  apostolic  age  could  not  be  continued,  or  must 
needs  be  interspaced  by  agencies  of  a  more  silent  charac- 
ter. It  may  have  been  that  they  would  by  and  by  cor- 

31 


362  OBJECTIONS    CONSIDERED. 

rupt  the  impressions  and  ideas  even  of  religion,  setting 
men  to  look  after  signs  and  prodigies  with  their  eyes,  in- 
ducing a  contempt  of  every  thing  else,  and  so,  instead  of 
attesting  God  to  men,  making  them  unspiritual  and  even 
incapable  of  faith.  Traces  of  this  mischief  begin  to  ap- 
pear even  in  the  times  of  the  apostles  themselves.  There- 
fore, when  the  fire  is  kindled,  the  smoke,  it  may  be,  ceas- 
es; or  rather  it  becomes  transparent,  so  that  we  do  not  so 
readily  see  it,  though  it  is  there.  Christianity,  it  is  very 
obvious,  inaugurates  the  faith  of  a  supernatural  agency  in 
the  world.  It  is  either  supernatural  or  it  is  a  nullity. 
Hence,  to  inaugurate  such  a  faith,  it  must  needs  make  its 
entry  into  the  world,  through  the  fact  of  a  divine  incarna- 
.tion  and  other  miracles.  In  these  we  have  the  pole  of 
thought,  opposite  to  nature,  set  before  us  in  distinct  exhibi 
tion.  And  then  the  problem  is,  having  the  two  poles  of 
nature  and  the  supernatural  presented,  that  we  be  trained 
to  apprehend  them  conjunctively,  or  as  working  together 
in  silent  terms  of  order.  For,  if  the  miracles  continue  in 
their  palpable  and  staring  forms  of  wonder,  and  take  their 
footing  as  a  permanent  institution,  they  will  breed  a  sens- 
uous, desultory  state  of  mind,  opposite  to  all  sobriety  and 
all  genuine  intelligence.  The  invalid  will  now  pray  to  be 
healed  by  pure  miracle,  and  will  never  learn  or  be  taught 
how  to  pray,  in  a  manner  that  contemplates  a  unifying 
of  the  supernatural  force  with  nature  and  the  system  of 
natural  causes.  At  a  certain  point  the  miracles  were  need- 
ed as  the  polar  signs  of  a  new  force,  but,  for  the  reason  sug- 
gested, it  appears  to  be  necessary,  also,  that  they  should  not 
be  continuous ;  otherwise  the  supernatural  will  never  be 
thought  into  any  terms  of  order,  as  a  force  conjoined  with 
nature  in  our  common  experience,  but  will  only  insti- 


OBJECTIONS    CONSIDEEED.  363 

gate  a  wild,  eccentric  temper,  closely  akin  to  unreason, 
and  to  all  practical  delusion.  And  yet  there  may  be 
times,  even  to  the  end  of  the  world,  when  some  outburst 
of  the  miraculous  force  of  God  will  be  needed  to  break 
up  a  lethargy  of  unbelief  and  sensuous  dullness,  equally 
unreasoning  and  delusory. 

Fourth  objection.  That  whatever  may  be  true  of  mir- 
acles in  other  respects,  they  are  only  demonstrations  of 
force;  therefore,  having  in  themselves  no  moral  quality, 
there  is  no  rational,  or  valuable,  or  even  proper  place  for 
them  in  a  gospel,  considered  as  a  new-creating  grace  for 
the  world.  To  this  we  answer  that  it  is  a  thing  of  no  sec- 
ondary importance  for  a  sinner,  down  under  sin,  and  held 
fast  in  its  bitter  terms  of  bondage,  to  see  that  God  has  en- 
tered into  his  case  with  a  force  that  is  adequate.  These 
mighty  works  of  Jesus,  which  have  been  done  and  duly 
certified,  are  fit  expressions  to  us  of  the  fact  that  he  can 
do  for  us  all  that  we  want.  Doubtless  it  is  a  great  and 
difficult  thing  to  regenerate  a  fallen  nature ;  no  person,  re- 
ally awake  to  his  miserable  and  dreadful  bondage,  ever 
thought  otherwise.  But  he  that  touched  the  blind  eyes 
and  commanded  the  leprosy  away,  he  that  trod  the  sea,  and 
raised  the  dead,  and  burst  the  bars  of  death  himself,  can 
tame  the  passions,  sweeten  the  bitter  affections,  regenerate 
the  inbred  diseases,  and  roll  back  all  the  storms  of  the 
mind.  Assured  in  this  manner  by  his  miracles,  they  be- 
come arguments  of  trust,  a  storehouse  of  powerful  images, 
that  invigorate  courage  and  stimulate  hope.  Broken 
as  we  are  by  our  sorrow,  cast  down  as  we  are  by  our 
guiltiness,  ashamed,  and  weak  and  ready  to  despair,  we 
can  yet  venture  a  hope  that  our  great  soul-miracle  may  be 
done ;  that,  if  we  can  but  touch  the  hem  of  Christ's  gar 


364  OBJECTIONS    CONSIDERED. 

ment,  a  virtue  will  go  out  of  him  to  heal  us.  In  all  dark 
days  and  darker  struggles  of  the  mind,  in  all  outward 
disasters,  and  amid  all  storms  upon  the  sea  of  life,  we  can 
yet  descry  him  treading  the  billows  and  hear  him  saying, 
"  It  is  I,  be  not  afraid."  And  lest  we  should  believe  the 
miracles  faintly,  for  there  is  a  busy  infidel  lurking  always 
in  our  hearts  to  cheat  us  of  our  faith,  when  he  can  not  rea- 
son, it  away,  the  character  of  Jesus  is  ever  shining  with 
and  through  them,  in  clear  self-evidence,  leaving  them 
never  to  stand  as  raw  wonders  only  of  might,  but  covering 
them  with  glory,  as  tokens  of  a  heavenly  love,  and  acts 
that  only  suit  the  proportions  of  his  personal  greatness  and 
majesty. 

There  are  many  in  our  day,  as  we  know,  who,  without 
making  any  speculative  point  of  the  objection  we  are  dis- 
cussing, have  so  far  yielded  to  the  current  misbelief  as  to 
profess,  with  a  certain  air  of  self-compliment,  that  they  are 
quite  content  to  accept  the  spirit  of  Jesus ;  and  let  the  mir- 
acles go  for  what  they  are  worth.  Little  figure  will  they 
make  as  Christians  in  that  kind  of  gospel.  They  will  not, 
in  fact,  receive  the  spirit  of  Jesus;  for  that  unabridged  is 
itself  the  Grand  Miracle  of  Christianity,  about  which  all 
the  others  play  as  scintillations  only  of  the  central  fire. 
Still  less  will  they  believe  that  Jesus  can  do  any  thing  in 
them  which  their  sin  requires.  They  will  only  compli- 
ment his  beauty,  imitate  or  ape  his  ways  in  a  feeble  lift- 
ing of  themselves,  but  that  he  can  roll  back  the  currents 
of  nature,  loosened  by  the  disorders  of  sin,  and  raise  them 
to  a  new  birth  in  holiness,  they  will  not  believe.  No  such 
watery  gospel  of  imitation,  separated  from  grace,  will  have 
any  living  power  in  their  life,  or  set  them  in  any  bond  of 
unity  with  God.  Nothing  but  to  say — "Jesus  of  Nazareth 


CHRIST    THE    TRUE    EVIDENCE.  365 

a  man  approved  of  God  by  miracles  and  signs  which  God 
did  by  him  " — can  draw  the  soul  to  faith  and  open  it  to  the 
power  of  a  supernatural  and  new-creative  mercy. 

We  come  back  then,  in  closing,  to  the  grand  first  prin- 
ciple of  evidence,  and  there  we  rest.  The  character  and 
doctrine  of  Jesus  are  the  sun  that  holds  all  the  minor  orbs 
of  revelation  to  their  places,  and  pours  a  sovereign  self- 
evidencing  light  into  all  religious  knowledge.  We  have 
been  debating  much,  and  ranging  over  a  wide  field,  in 
chase  of  the  many  phantoms  of  doubt  and  false  argument, 
still  we  have  not  far  to  go  for  light,  if  only  we  could  cease 
debating  and  sit  down  to  see.  It  is  no  ingenious  fetches 
of  argument  that  we  want;  no  external  testimony,  gath- 
ered here  and  there  from  the  records  of  past  ages,  suffices 
to  end  our  doubts;  but  it  is  the  new  sense  opened  in  us 
by  Jesus  himself — a  sense  deeper  than  words  and  more  im- 
mediate than  inference — of  the  miraculous  grandeur  of  his 
life ;  a  glorious  agreement  felt  between  his  works  and  his 
person,  such  that  his  miracles  themselves  are  proved  to  us 
in  our  feeling,  believed  in  by  that  inward  testimony.  On 
this  inward  testimony  we  are  willing  to  stake  every  thing, 
even  the  life  that  now  is,  and  that  which  is  to  come.  If 
the  miracles,  if  revelation  itself,  can  not  stand  upon  the 
superhuman  character  of  Jesus,  then  let  it  fall.  If  that 
character  does  not  contain  all  truth  and  centralize  all  truth 
in  itself,  then  let  there  be  no  truth.  If  there  is  any  thing 
worthy  of  belief  not  found  in  this,  we  may  well  consent 
to  live  and  die  without  it.  Before  this  sovereign  light, 
streaming  out  from  God,  the  deep  questions,  and  dark  sur- 
mises, and  doubts  unresolved,  which  make  a  night  so 
gloomy  and  terrible  about  us,  hurry  away  to  their  native 
abyss.  God,  who  commanded  the  light  to  shine  out  ol 

31* 


366  IN    HIM"   WE    REST. 

darkness,  hath  shined  in  our  hearts  to  give  the  light  of 
the  knowledge  of  the  glory  of  God  in  the  face  of  Jesus 
Christ.  This  it  is  that  has  conquered  the  assaults  of  doubt 
and  false  learning  in  all  past  ages,  and  will  in  all  ages  to 
come.  No  argument  against  the  sun  will  drive  it  from 
the  sky.  No  mole-eyed  skepticism,  dazzled  by  its  bright- 
ness, can  turn  away  the  shining  it  refuses  to  look  upon. 
And  they  who  long  after  God,  will  be  ever  turning  their 
eyes  thitherward,  and  either  with  reason  or  without  reason, 
or,  if  need  be,  against  manifold  impediments  of  reason, 
will  see  and  believe. 


CHAPTER   XII. 

WATER-MARKS  IN  THE  CHRISTIAN  DOCTRINE. 

THERE  is  no  kind  of  evidence  that  is  so  convincing,  or 
is  received  with  so  great  satisfaction,  as  that  which,  after 
long  and  doubtful  search,  is  suddenly  discovered  to  have 
all  the  while  been  on  hand,  incorporated,  though  unob- 
served, in  the  very  subject  matter  of  inquiry.  Thus,  for 
example,  a  suit  upon  a  note  of  hand  had  long  been  pend- 
ing in  one  of  the  courts  of  our  commonwealth,  payment 
of  which  was  resisted,  on  the  ground  that  it  was  and  must 
be  a  forgery,  no  such  note  having  ever  been  given.  But 
the  difficulty  was,  in  the  trial,  to  make  out  any  conclusive 
evidence  of  what  the  defending  party  knew  to  be  the 
truth.  His  counsel  was,  in  fact,  despairing  utterly  of 
success;  but  it  happened  that,  just  as  he  was  about 
closing  his  plea,  having  the  note  in  his  hand,  and  bringing 
it  up,  in  the  motion  of  his  hand,  so  that  the  light  struck 
through,  his  eye  caught  the  glimpse  of  A  mark  in  the  pa- 
per. He  stopped,  held  it  up  deliberately  to  the  light,  and 
behold  the  name,  in  water-mark,  of  a  company  that  had 
begun  the  manufacture  of  paper  after  the  date  of  the  in- 
strument !  Here  was  evidence,  without  going  far  to  seek 
it — evidence  enough  to  turn  the  plaintiff  forthwith  into  a 
felon,  and  consign  him,  as  it  did,  to  a  felon's  punishment. 

Just  so  there  is,  we  now  propose  to  show,  a  certain 
divine  water-mark  in  the  Christian  doctrine,  which,  wheth- 
er we  see  it  or  not,  is  there,  waiting,  at  all  times,  to  be 
seen,  and  to  give  to  all  who  will  look  for  it,  indubitable 
proof  of  its  supernatural  and  divine  origin. 


368         A    DISTINCTION    OF    CHRISTIANITY. 

And,  first  of  all,  we  select  for  an  example,  or  principal 
instance,  the  grand  comprehensive  distinction  of  the  Chris- 
tian system,  viz.,  the  assumption  it  every  where  makes  of 
a  necessarily  twofold  economy  in  the  training  of  souls. 
This  assumption,  or  assumed  necessity,  appears  and  reap- 
pears on  almost  every  page  of  the  New  Testament.  The 
two  economies  are  "  two  covenants ; "  two  ministrations ; 
"  a  ministration  of  condemnation,"  and  a  "  ministration  of 
righteousness;"  "law  and  grace;"  "bondage  and  lib- 
erty ; "  "  the  letter  that  killeth,  and  the  spirit  that  giveth 
life;"  "the  law  that  makes  nothing  perfect;"  and 
"  charity  which  is  the  bond  of  perfectness." 

We  have  spoken  already*  of  this  twofold  process  in  the 
training  of  a  soul,  and  shown  the  privative  condition  it  is 
necessarily  in,  till  it  has  passed  through  the  first  stage  or 
economy,  and  come  forth  in  the  second.  Our  object  here, 
in  recurring  to  the  subject,  is  different ;  viz.,  to  show  the 
remarkable  advantage  Christianity,  or  the  Christian  gospel 
has,  in  the  positive  and  deliberate  recognition  of  a  truth 
so  plainly  fundamental,  and  one  that,  as  soon  as  it  is  defi- 
nitely stated,  inevitably  verifies  itself  and  becomes  an  im- 
movable conviction  in  every  thoughtful  mind.  Christian- 
ity is  just  here  quite  alone ;  alone,  that  is,  in  the  deepest 
and  most  radical  of  all  conceptions  that  pertain  to  the  dis- 
cipline of  virtue ;  alone,  that  is,  in  perceiving  beforehand 
the  necessary  duality  of  the  process,  and  conforming  itself 
deliberately  to  what  is  required,  in  the  preparation  of  a 
grand  dual  economy.  In  this  fact  all  the  human  philoso- 
phers are  left  behind.  For,  while  the  Christian  scriptures 
are  so  forward,  and  full,  and  explicit,  in  asserting  the  two 
testaments,  and  displaying  their  relative  use  and  power, 

*  Chapter  IV.,  p.  117. 


THE    DUAL    ECONOMY    OF    VIRTUE.  369 

throwing  themselves  out  boldly  on  their  doctrine,  in  the 
noble  confidence  of  truth,  the  philosophers  do  not  appear, 
as  yet,  even  to  have  had  their  attention  attracted  to  the 
question.  Such  of  them  as  were  educated  under  Chris- 
tianity, appear  to  have  regarded  its  manfold  representa- 
tions of  letter  and  'spirit,  law  and  grace,  a  ministration 
of  condemnation  and  a  ministration  of  righteousness,  as 
the  unmeaning  jingle  or  pious  cant  only  of  revelation; 
entitled,  in  that  view,  to  no  philosophic  respect.  Indeed 
it  is  not  a  little  remarkable,  that  some  of  the  heathen  phi- 
losophers appear  to  have  approached  the  Christian  doctrine 
more  closely  than  they. 

Our  Christian  philosophers,  so  called — Christian,  not  be- 
cause they  teach  any  thing  that  deserves  the  name,  but 
because  they  are  born  in  Christian  countries — commonly 
begin  with  man  as  being  simply  a  conscious  intelligence, 
conceiving  him  to  be  in  his  proper  normal  state,  and  to 
have,  in  that  view,  certain  susceptibilities  to  virtue;  a 
conscience,  a  free  will,  a  power  of  doing  good,  and  receiv- 
ing injury.  Then,  ignoring,  as  a  fact  of  no  consequence, 
the  abnormal  and  diseased  state  of  sin,  they  go  on  to  build 
up  their  schemes  of  ethical  practice;  showing  what  the 
foundations  of  virtue  may  be,  and  upon  those  foundations 
erecting  their  codes  of  observance.  But  as  they  never  al- 
low themselves  to  look  on  the  fact  of  depravity,  and  the 
consequent  state  of  psychological  disorder,  so  they  never 
trouble  themselves  about  any  such  superlative  notions  of 
virtuous  living,  as  respect  the  perfection  and  final  beati- 
tude of  the  soul.  Their  concern  is  simply  to  determine 
the  authority  of  what  is  called  virtue,  and  show  the  mat- 
ters of  good  behavior  that  are  binding  on  men,  in  the 
relations  of  domestic,  social,  and  public  life.  They  incul- 


370  THE    DUAL    ECONOMY    OF    VIRTUE, 

cate  nothing  but  legalities.  It  is  virtue  enough  to  do  the 
right  things,  no  matter  whether  they  are  done  grudgingly 
and  by  hard  constraint,  or  willingly,  cheerfully,  and 
gladly,  as  the  spontaneous  tribute  of  a  full  and  ready 
heart ;  no  matter,  indeed,  whether  it  be  only  the  doing  of 
some  right  things,  such  as  concern  human  society,  leaving 
out  the  duties  owed  to  God,  or  whether  it  include  all  duty 
and  so  the  possibility  of  a  principle  1  Meager,  sad-look- 
ing impostures,  these  ethical  schemes,  that  bear  the  name 
of  philosophy ! 

But  the  heathen  philosophers,  as  we  have  already  inti- 
mated, often  do  better.  It  is  not  any  part  of  philosophy 
with  them,  to  steer  wide  of  the  truths  of  Christianity, 
and  ignpre  all  the  great  questions  of  revealed  religion. 
Their  ignorance  of  Christianity  delivers  them  of  any 
such  feeble  and  absurd  jealousy.  Accordingly  they  go 
directly  into  the  great  and  solemn  problems  of  human 
existence,  with  a  free  mind,  and  a  universal  aim.  They 
take  up  the  question  of  evil.  They  recognize,  in  the  full- 
est manner,  as  we  have  shown  already,  the  depravity  of 
human  nature,  and  the  state  of  general  distemper  pro- 
duced by  sin.  They  recognize  also  the  sense  of  bondage 
encountered  by  every  soul,  in  its  endeavors  to  resume  self- 
government,  and  re-establish  the  harmony  of  virtue. 
They  go  farther,  they  conceive  a  new  and  higher  state  of 
possible  assimilation  to  God,  or  the  gods,  which  they  cel- 
ebrate as  the  liberty  of  virtue.  Thus  Plato  shows  that 
"  the  more  conformed  the  soul  is  to  the  Divine  Will,  so 
much  the  more  perfect  and  free  it  is."*  Even  Aristotle 
recognizes  the  necessity  of  freedom  in  virtuous  exercises, 
as  being  the  only  sufficient  ground  of  stability  in  them, 

*Leg.  4. 


A    DISTINCTION    OP    CHEISTIANITY.         371 

"  because  blessed  souls  live  and  dwell  always  in  such  ex- 
ercises, without  tediousness  or  staleness  of  mind."*  Epic- 
tetus,  in  like  manner,  shows  that  "  submitting  the  mind 
to  the  mind  that  governs  all  things,  as  good  citizens  to 
the  law,  is  perfect  liberty."f  And  Seneca  coincides  with 
all  such  testimonies,  in  the  declaration  "  that  it  is  a  great 
and  free  mind  that  has  given  itself  up  to  God."  It  could 
also  be  shown,  by  abundant  citations,  that  they  even  dis- 
allowed the  name  of  virtue  to  any  merely  legal  or  con- 
strained practice.  Having  advanced  so  far,  in  the  right 
direction,  we  almost  look  to  see  them  taking  up  the  im- 
pression of  some  necessary  twofold  process,  in  the  grand 
economy  of  virtue.  But  they  -are  in  a  limitation.  The 
assimilation  to  God,  in  which  they  rest  their  hope  of  lib- 
erty, or  the  complete  state  of  virtue,  is  not  prepared  by  a 
gospel  and  a  new,  supernatural,  and  redemptive  move- 
ment, but  only,  as  they  conceive,  by  an  application  of 
their  minds  to  God.  "The  philosopher,"  says  Plato, 
"  conversing  with  what  is  divine  and  excellent,  becomes, 
as  far  as  what  is  human  may,  divine  and  excellent.":}: 
Again,  "Assimilation  to  God,  in  righteousness  and  holi- 
ness, is  the  result  of  wisdom  or  philosophy."!  They  had 
no  conception,  therefore,  of  two  ministrations,  and  could 
not  be  expected,  under  a  scheme  of  truth  so  deficient,  to 
take  up  the  yet  deeper  conception  of  a  necessarily  two- 
fold process,  in  the  economy  of  virtue.  As  the  Christian 
philosophers  have  never  taken  the  hint  of  this  antecedent 
necessity,  from  the  manifold  declarations  of  the  scripture, 
so  these  others  have  fallen  short  of  it,  because  they  had 
nothing  to  yield  them  such  a  hint. 

And  yet  how  easy  it  seems,  having  the  hint  of  it  once 

* Eth.,  L.  L,  0.  10.        fin  Arrian,  1:2.        J Kepub.        §  Theatet. 


372  THE    DUAL    ECONOMY    OF    VIRTUE, 

given,  to  verify  this  necessity !  Though  no  one  of  the 
philosophers  was  ever  able  to  take  up  such  a  conception, 
it  requires  no  philosopher,  when  it  is  once  given,  but  only 
a  thoughtful  man,  to  perceive  the  certain  truth  of  it.  If 
(1.)  there  is  to  be  a  moral  regimen  set  up  in  souls,  it  must 
begin  with  law,  or  imposed  obligation ;  no  matter  whether  it 
"le  only  pronounced  in  the  conscience,  or  outwardly  also  in 
a  revelation.  Again,  (2.)  it  is  equally  plain  that  mere  law 
can  bring  nothing  to  perfection.  The  experiment  of  dis- 
obedience will  be  tried.  The  very  motive  it  supplies  to 
virtue,  viz.,  retribution,  makes  the  virtue  wearisome,  and 
a  burden  certain  to  be  cast  off.  It  has  no  motivity  that 
generates  liberty ;  on  the  contrary,  the  motivity  it  has,  ap- 
pealing only  to  interest,  detains  from  liberty.  And  yet, 
(3.)  the  law,  it  is  equally  manifest,  will  be  a  necessary 
condition,  or  first  stage  in  the  process  of  holy  training. 
It  will  impress  the  sense  of  law,  as  a  condition  of  well- 
being.  It  will  also  develop  the  knowledge  of  sin — what  it 
is,  and  does,  and  deserves.  And  the  bondage  it  creates, 
or  which  is  created  under  it,  the  hopelessness,  the  death, 
will  prepare  the  want  of  a  deliverer.  The  regimen  of  ab- 
stract law,  again,  (4.)  is,  in  this  view,  seen  to  be  inherently 
faulty,  even  though  the  precept  be  perfect ;  hence  that  noth- 
ing but  a  personal  homage,  or  faith  in  a  divine  person — 
whose  character  and  life,  embraced  in  love,  suppose  the 
embrace  of  all  law — can  finally  bring  in  its  principle,  and 
establish  it  in  the  liberty  of  an  eternal  and  celestial  love. 

See,  then,  how  distinctly  all  this  and  more  is  said  in 
the  Christian  documents.  Hold  them  up  to  the  light,  and 
let  the  divine  water-mark,  or  inwrought  signature  of  God, 
appear  1  Whence  comes  it  that  these  gospels  and  epistles, 
clothed  in  no  pomp  of  philosophy,  and  decked  with  no 


A    DISTINCTION    OP    CHBISTIANITY.         373 

literary  pretensions,  so  far  transcend  all  the  philosophy  of 
all  ages,  opening  up  deeper  truths  regarding  the  great 
problem  of  human  existence,  than  have  any  where  else 
been  discovered  to  the  thought  of  man  ?  They  tell  us,  in 
the  utmost  simplicity  of  man  jer,  and  with  no  air  of  dis- 
covery, that  God  has  two  ministrations  for  us,  letter  and 
spirit,  law  and  grace.  As  regards  the  first,  they  tell  us 
that  it  is  a  fundamental  and  first  fact  in  God's  economy, 
no  jot  or  tittle  of  which  can  ever  fail — a  perfect  law,  and 
so  the  basis,  or  formal  idea,  of  all  perfection.  Yet,  as  an 
abstraction,  commanded  by  authority,  and  enforced  by 
power,  it  makes  nothing  perfect.  It  is  only  a  schoolmas- 
ter, that  sets  the  training  on  foot,  and  brings  it  on  a  single 
stage.  It  is  more  unfortunate,  however,  than  most  school- 
masters, for  the  stage  it  prepares  is  one  of  loss  and  defeat, 
and  not  of  gain — ordained  to  be  unto  life,  it  is  found  to 
be  unto  death.  It  is  a  ministration  of  condemnation.  It 
is  the  letter  that  killeth.  It  entered  that  the  offense  might 
abound.  Weak  through  the  flesh,  it  accomplishes  noth- 
ing but  a  state  of  bondage,  and  the  loosing  of  retributive 
causes  that  set  the  whole  creation  groaning  and  travailing 
in  pain  together.  And  all  this,  we  perceive,  was  under- 
stood as  well  at  the  beginning  as  afterward.  For,  if  there 
had  been  a  law  given  that  could  have  given  life,  then 
verily  righteousness  should  have  been  by  the  law.  But 
that  was  inherently  impossible,  and  the  impossibility  is 
recognized  from  the  first.  The  legal  state  was  instituted, 
not  as  a  finality,  but  as  a  first  stage  in  the  process  of 
training ;  to  develop  the  sense  of  guilt  and  spiritual  want, 
to  beget  a  knowledge  of  sin,  its  exceeding  sinfulness,  and 
the  insupportable  bondage  it  creates.  And  then  appears, 
in  the  person  of  the  incarnate  Redeemer  a  new  and 

32 


374  THE    DUAL    ECONOMY    OF    VIRTUE, 

higher  ministration,  designed,  from  the  foundation  of  the 
world,  to  complement,  or  even  in  superseding,  to  establish 
the  other.  Now  he  hath  obtained  a  more  excellent 
ministry,  by  how  much  also  he  is  the  mediator  of  a  better 
covenant,  which  was  established  upon  better  promises. 
For,  if  that  first  covenant  had  been  faultless,  then  should 
no  place  have  been  sought  for  the  second.  Now  it  is  no 
more  a  question  of  works ;  there  never  could  have  been  a 
rational  expectation  of  human  perfection  on  that  basis; 
but  it  is  a  question  of  simple  faith.  The  righteousness 
of  God  without,  or  apart  from  the  law,  is  now  manifested, 
even  the  righteousness  of  God  which  is  by  faith  of  Jesus 
Christ,  unto  all  and  upon  all  them  that  believe.  What 
we  call  our  virtue  now  is  no  more  a  will- work,  or  a  some- 
thing done  according  to  law,  but  it  is  a  continuous  and 
living  ingeneration  of  God,  who  has  thus  become  a  divine 
impulse  or  quickening  in  us,  and  so  the  life  of  our 
life.  Therefore  now  we  are  free.  Embracing  the  person 
of  Christ,  and  yielding  the  homage  of  our  hearts  to  him, 
we  do,  in  fact,  resume  the  law,  in  our  deliverance  from  its 
bondage.  We  keep  his  commandments,  because  we  ad- 
here to  his  person,  and  we  enter  thus  into  a  liberty  that 
fulfills  all  law,  the  liberty  of  love.  There  is  therefore 
now  no  condemnation  to  them  that  are  in  Christ  Jesus. 
For  the  law  of  the  spirit  of  life  in  Christ  Jesus  hath  made 
us  free  from  the  law  of  sin  and  death.  For  what  the  law 
could  not  do,  in  that  it  was  weak  through  the  flesh,  God, 
sending  his  own  Son  in  the  likeness  of  sinful  flesh,  and 
for  sin,  condemned  sin  in  the  flesh,  that  the  righteousness 
of  the  law  [i.  e.,  of  the  precept,]  might  be  fulfilled  in  us, 
who  walk  not  after  the  flesh,  but  after  the  Spirit.  The 
bondage  now  is  gone.  The  stage  of  liberty  is  come.  This 


A    DISTINCTION    OF    CHRISTIANITY.         875 

is  the  Spirit  that  giveth  life.  This  is  the  ministration  of 
righteousness.  And  if  the  ministration  of  condemnation 
be  glorious,  much  more  doth  the  ministration  of  righteous- 
ness exceed  in  glory. 

This  exposition  of  the  two  ministrations  we  have  given 
as  nearly  as  possible  in  the  language  of  scripture.  Not 
to  be  struck  by  the  magnificence  of  the  thought,  would 
argue  great  dullness.  All  known  speculations  of  philos- 
ophy regarding  the  moral  economy  of  human  life,  sink 
into  littleness  and  utter  incompetency  by  the  side  of  it. 

A  very  curious  question,  then,  it  is,  whence  came  this 
doctrine,  and  what  should  have  set  any  writer,  or  any 
Christian  school  of  writers,  on  the  conception  of  it  ?  "Why 
does  it  appear  in  the  scriptures  of  the  New  Testament, 
and  nowhere  else?  It  has,  at  first,  a  canting  sound,  it 
wears  a  strange,  peculiar  air,  and  comes  to  us  in  strange, 
half-mystic  words — "letter"  and  "spirit,"  "law"  and 
" grace,"  two  " covenants,"  two  "testaments,"  two  "min- 
istrations"— but  it  grows  under  inspection,  fills  itself  out 
in  the  sublimity  of  its  reasons,  and  finally  stands  confessed 
as  the  only  adequate,  the  only  true  and  real  philosophy. 
It  is  no  crude  suggestion,  or  new  thought  half  discovered. 
It  is  fully  wrought  out ;  all  the  points  are  stated.  Every 
thing  is  set  in  complete  working  order ;  yet  with  no  pa- 
rade of  .science  or  of  definition,  and,  as  it  were,  no  con- 
sciousness of  the  transcendent  superiority  it  reveals. 
Whence,  then,  came  it  ?  that  is  the  question.  And  there 
is  but  one  answer.  We  could  sooner  believe  that  Plato's 
dialogues  were  written  by  some  wild  herdsman  of  Scythici, 
than  that  this  grand  distinctive  doctrine  of  the  scripture 
is  of  human  invention.  It  bears  the  eternal  water-nwt 
of  divinity,  and  that  ends  all  inquiry. 


376     NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

We  pass  on  now  to  observe  another  most  impressive 
distinction  of  Christianity,  in  what  may  be  called  the 
grouping  of  its  ideas;  and  especially  the  fact  that  they 
group  themselves  in  such  beautiful  order  and  harmony 
about  the  grand,  supernatural  fact  of  the  incarnation. 
That  it  is  a  fact  supernatural  in  its  form,  will  not  be  de- 
nied; this  indeed  is  one  of  the  chief  grounds  of  impeach- 
ment against  the  gospels.  It  will  also  be  agreed,  that  if 
any  such  divine  movement  is  really  inaugurated  in  the 
Arorld,  there  needs  to  be  also  a  whole  system  of  ideas  and 
doctrines,  springing  forth  and  grouping  themselves  in  or- 
der round  it.  Otherwise  we  have  no  sufficient  instrument- 
ation, for  our  human  use  or  handling  of  so  great  a  fact,  and 
our  personal  appropriation  of  it — no  fit  medium  of  thought 
respecting  it. 

Here  then  we  discover,  again,  upon  a  large  scale,  the 
secret  evidence  of  a  higher  presence  in  the  gospel.  To 
frame  such  a  fitting  of  ideas  and  doctrines,  by  human  in- 
vention, out  of  the  materials  of  natural  sagacity  and  rea- 
son, we  may  fairly  say  is  impossible.  There  have  been  as 
many  as  nine  avatars  or  incarnations,  the  Bramins  tell  us, 
of  their  god  Yishnu ;  and  multitudes  of  incarnations  can  be 
cited,  from  the  various  pagan  mythologies;  but  when  has 
there  been  developed,  round  the  pretended  supernatural 
fact,  any  scheme  of  ideas  or  truths,  internally  agreeing  with 
it  and  having  their  roots  of  life  in  it?  It  is  a  very  easy 
thing,  we  may  admit,  to  imagine  a  supernatural  fact,  an 
incarnation  for  example,  but  to  fit  it  with  a  range  of  doc- 
trines and  holy  ideas,  such  as  will  connect  it  with  human 
experience  and  make  it  practical,  is  what  no  mortal  wis- 
dom was  ever  able  to  do.  Thus,  if  there  were  given  the 
fact  of  the  incarnation  of  Jesus  Christ,  or  his  miraculous 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       377 

birth  as  the  Son  of  Mary,  there  is  no  philosopher  of  man- 
kind who  could  invent,  around  that  central  fact,  a  system 
of  ideas  and  doctrines  that  would  not,  by  their  wild  ex- 
travagance, and  also  by  their  manifest  want  of  any  vital 
agreement  or  coherence  with  it,  turn  it  into  mockery. 
Much  less  could  he  form  a  vehicle  of  doctrine,  that  would 
make  that  central  fact  a  power,  in  the  practical  life,  and 
dovetail  it  into  the  experience  of  mankind. 

But  all  this  we  shall  see  accomplished,  in  the  easiest  and 
most  natural  manner  possible  in  the  Christian  doctrine. 
And  this  is  the  line  of  our  argument ;  that  all  the  capital 
points  or  ideas  of  Christianity,  frame  into  the  supernatu- 
ral, on  one  hand,  in  such  beautiful  order  and  facility,  and 
without  any  strain  of  contrivance  or  logical  adaptation; 
and  into  human  experience,  on  the  other,  in  a  way  so  con- 
sonant to  the  dignity  of  reason,  and  the  wants  and  disa- 
bilities of  sin,  that  the  signature  of  God  is  plainly  legible 
in  the  documents.  The  examples  to  be  cited  are  numer- 
ous, and  we  set  them  forth  under  numerical  notations. 

1.  The  new  religion,  or  that  of  the  divine  advent,  is 
called  a  gospel.  Why  a  gospel  more  than  a  wisdom,  or 
philosophy,  or  doctrine?  These,  and  such  like,  are  the 
names  assumed  by  all  the  world's  great  teachers;  but  it 
occurs  to  none  of  them  to  call  their  utterance,  whatever  it 
be,  good  news  or  a  gospel.  Whence  the  distinction?  It 
grows  out  of  the  simple  fact  that  they  offer  a  doctrine 
drawn  out  of  premises  in  nature,  and  the  contents  of  natu- 
ral reason,  a  doctrine  which,  being  in  those  premises,  is 
already  given,  and  only  waits  to  be  deduced.  Whereas, 
Christ  comes  into  the  world  from  without,  and  above  it, 
and  brings  in  with  him  new  premises,  not  here  before. 
He  is  therefore  proclaimed  as  news,  good  news — "behold 

32* 


378        NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

I  bring  you  good  tidings  of  great  joy  which  shall  be  to  all 
people."  Christ  also  conceives  himself  and  his  work 
in  the  same  manner — "Go  ye  into  all  the  world  and  preach 
the  gospel  to  every  creature."  His  apostles  all  follow  tes- 
tifying the  fact,  as  new  tidings — "God  was  in  Christ  re- 
conciling the  world  unto  himself."  If  it  should  be  said 
that  the  work  of  Christ  is  called  a  gospel  by  mere  natural 
suggestion,  because  it  is  a  real  communication  from  an- 
other world  to  this,  we  care  not  to  object,  because  the 
term  is  thus  accounted  for  in  a  way  that  supposes  the  fact 
of  a  supernatural  mission ;  though,  if  the  supposed  mis- 
sion were  a  fact  given,  it  is  doubtful  whether  any  human 
skill,  left  to  itself,  would  ever  suit  the  fact  with  a  name 
that  so  exactly  corresponds  with  its  peculiarity,  as  a  fact 
appearing  in  the  world,  but  not  of  it.  It  would  be  called 
by  any  other  name,  probably,  as  soon  as  by  the  name  gos- 
pel, and  if  some  name  in  great  repute  with  men  were  at 
hand,  such  as  would  mark  it  with  a  special  honor,  prob- 
ably sooner.  But  suppose  there  were  no  supernatural  fact 
at  all  in  the  case,  and  that  all  we  find  of  that  character  in 
the  work  were  reducible  to  myth,  or  quite  explained  away 
by  a  rationalistic  interpretation.  Whence,  in  that  view, 
will  the  name  gospel  come?  If  there  is  no  supernatural 
fact  at  all,  nor  any  thing  more  than  a  pretense  of  it,  who 
is  going  to  handle  even  that  fiction  so  nicely,  as  to  fit  it 
with  the  very  peculiar  name,  gospel  f 

2.  We  have  another  of  the  radical  notions  of  this  gos- 
pel presented  in  the  word  salvation.  The  work  is  called  a 
salvation.  The  incarnate  Word  is  named  Jesus,  by  antic- 
ipation ;  because  he  will  save  the  people  from  their  sins. 
He  declares  finally,  that  he  came  to  seek  and  to  save,  and 
his  work  is  published,  after  he  is  gone,  as  the  grace  of 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       379 

God  that  bringeth  salvation.  Meantime  no  human  teacher 
has  ever  come  to  men  with  any  thing  called  by  that  name. 
The  human  teachers  come  with  disquisitions,  theories,  phi- 
losophies, pedagogies,  schemes  of  reformation,  ideal  repuo- 
lics,  doctrines  of  association.  But  they,  none  of  them, 
speak  of  salvation.  And  that,  for  the  simple  reason,  that 
they  have  not  conceived  the  state  of  unnature  under  sin, 
as  a  really  lost  or  undone  state,  requiring  a  supernatural 
and  divine  interposition  to  restore  the  ruin  suffered.  This 
is  the  point  distinctly  conceived  by  Christianity,  and  there- 
fore it  is  called  a  salvation.  Plato  saw  distinctly  enough 
the  depravity  of  human  nature,  and  his  doctrine  of  virtue, 
we  have  seen,  was  that  it  can  be  formed  in  the  soul,  only 
by  a  divine  communication.  It  is  therefore  only  the  more 
impressive,  as  a  contrast,  that,  having  these  two  elements 
of  Christianity  on  hand,  he  nowhere  conceives  the  virtue 
wrought  to  be  a  salvation.  After  all,  the  state  of  sin  is  not 
to  him  a  practically  lost  state,  but  the  transition  to  virtue, 
slurred  by  indistinctness,  is  virtually  regarded  as  a  growth, 
or  advance,  on  the  footing  of  nature ;  not  a  rescue  from 
nature  by  a  power  above  nature;  therefore  not  a  salvation. 
3.  The  doctrine  of  this  salvation  makes  it  a  salvation, 
by  faith;  in  which  we  have  another  ruling  idea  of  the 
scheme  that  coincides  with  its  supernatural  facts  and  char- 
acter. Christianity  differs  from  all  philosophies  and  ethic- 
al doctrines  of  men,  in  the  fact  that  it  rests  all  virtue  in 
faith ;  exactly  as  it  should,  if  it  be  a  grace  imported  into 
nature  from  without,  an  advent  in  the  world  of  one  who 
is  from  above.  Such  a  salvation  lies  not  within  the  prem- 
ises of  natural  fact  and  reason ;  it  is  not  therefore  a  mat- 
ter of  science,  or  of  logical  deduction.  It  makes  its  ad- 
dress, therefore,  not  to  reason,  but  to  faith.  Reason  may 


380      NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

be  allowed  to  have  a  tribunitial  veto  against  it,  provided 
the  doctrine  is  certainly  proved  to  be  contrary  to  reason; 
but  it  can  not  be  received  by  reason.  It  is  only  received, 
when  faith  comes,  laden  with  sin  and  fettered  by  its  iron 
bondage,  to  rest  herself,  in  holy  trust,  on  the  transcendent 
fact  of  such  an  appearing,  and  to  find  by  experiment  that 
it  is,  in  sacred  reality  and  power,  what  it  assumes  to  be. 
It  finds  the  new  premise  true,  proves  it  to  be  true,  intuits 
it,  in  and  by  the  immediate  experience  of  the  mind.  The 
new  salvation  is  by  faith,  because  it  is  a  supernatural  sal- 
vation; for  whatever  virtue  the  plan  ministers  must  be 
in  and  by  the  receiver's  faith,  practically  trusting  soul  and 
spirit  to  the  fact  of  such  a  Saviour  and  salvation. 

There  is  much  quarreling  with  the  New  Testament  on 
this  ground.  It  becomes  an  offense  because  it  requires 
faith.  Where  is  the  merit  of  mere  believing,  that  it  should 
be  made  the  necessary  condition  of  salvation?  In  one 
view  there  is  none,  we  answer,  and  it  is  not  required  be- 
cause there  is  any.  There  is  no  merit  in  trusting  a  phy- 
sician, but  it  may  be  a  matter  of  some  consequence  that 
his  medicines  be  taken;  as  they  will  not  be,  without  some 
kind  of  faith  in  him.  So  it  is  a  matter  of  consequence  that 
the  Christian  grace  be  accepted,  as  it  certainly  will  not  be, 
unless  the  soul  is  practically  trusted  to  it,  and  the  giver. 
If  there  is  to  be  a  healing,  a  new  ingeneration  of  life  and 
holy  virtue,  it  can  never  be,  save  by  the  efficacy  of  a  su- 
pernatural remedy.  Believing  in  that  remedy  is  the  same 
thing  as  coming  into  its  power;  and,  therefore,  on  this 
faith  the  gospel  hangs  salvation.  It  could  not  be  other- 
wise. If  Christianity,  being  supernatural,  offered  salvation 
on  any  other  terms  than  faith,  the  offer  would  even  be  ab- 
surd, having  no  agreement  with  the  grace  offered.  That 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       381 

it  hangs  salvation  on  this  condition,  indicates  a  thorough 
insight  of  its  own  nature,  and  the  more  ready  the  shallow 
wit  of  man  is  to  find  fault  with  such  a  condition,  as  hu- 
miliating or  insulting  to  reason,  the  more  evidently  it  is 
not  from  man,  but  from  a  superior  and  superhuman  source. 

Eegarding  faith,  in  this  manner,  as  having  its  value,  not 
in  its  own  merit,  but  in  what  it  receives,  we  would  not  be 
understood  to  represent  it  as  an  optional  matter,  without 
any  positive  obligation.  It  is  a  duty  binding  on  every 
moral  being,  to  believe  and  practically  receive  every  thing 
that  is  true ;  and  this  on  the  principle  that  mind,  honestly 
used,  will  distinguish  all  important  truth.  Doubtless  one 
may  become  so  entangled  by  the  ingenious  sophistries  of 
sin,  or  so  darkened  by  its  baleful  shadow,  that  he  can  not 
in  a  moment  find,  or  finding,  can  not  embrace  the  truth. 
In  such  a  case,  the  blame  must  rest  upon  his  guilty  past, 
and  the  mental  distortion  he  has  created,  by  his  former 
abuse  of  truth,  until  such  time  as  he  can  recover  his  sight. 
And  this  he  may  do  rapidly,  if  only,  trusting  in  God,  he 
will  take  into  practice,  for  medicine,  every  single  truth  he 
is  able  to  find.  All  his  unbeliefs  and  misbeliefs  will  be 
certainly  cleared  in  this  manner.  And  therefore  Christ 
requires  it  of  him,  that  they  shall  be ;  throwing  his  salva- 
tion even  upon  his  belief  of  the  truth. 

4.  Justification  by  faith  is  another  distinctive  point  of 
the  Christian  gospel.  And  this  includes  two  principal 
matters  combined;  that  the  transgressor,  believing,  has  a 
righteousness  generated  in  him,  which  is  not  built  up  un- 
der the  law,  by  his  own  practice;  and  that  something  has 
been  done  to  compensate  the  law,  violated  by  his  past  of- 
fenses, and  save  it  in  honor,  when  his  sin  is  forgiven. 

As  to  the  former,  the  righteousness  ingenerated,  the 


382      NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

manner  is  sufficiently  indicated,  when  it  is  called  the 
righteousness  that  is  of  (rod  by  faith,  unto  and  upon  all 
them  that  believe.  It  is  unto  and  upon  such  only  as  be- 
lieve; because,  as  we  just  now  said,  speaking  of  salvation, 
it  is  only  by  faith  that  the  soul  is  so  trusted  to,  and  depos- 
ited in,  the  supernatural  grace  of  God,  as  to  be  invested 
with  his  righteousness,  or  assimilated  to  it.  Besides  it 
will  be  observed  that  this  is  called  justification,  partly  be- 
cause the  natural  laws  of  retributive  justice,  which  are 
penally  chastising  the  sinner,  holding  him  fast  in  the 
meshes  of  inextricable  disorder  and  woe,  can  be  contro- 
verted, or  turned  aside,  only  by  a  power  supernatural  and 
divine. 

As  to  the  latter  point  concerned,  the  implied  compensa- 
tion to  law,  in  the  supposed  free  justification,  it  is  not  that 
something  is  done  to  be  a  spectacle  before  unknown  worlds, 
or  something  to  square  up  a  legal  account  of  pains  and 
penalties,  according  to  some  small  scheme  of  book-keeping 
philosophy,  but  it  is  simply  this;  that,  as  there  must  be 
two  stages  of  discipline  to  carry  on  the  world — viz.,  letter 
and  spirit,  law  and  grace — the  introduction  of  pardon,  or 
the  universal  and  free  remission  of  sins,  must  be  so  pre- 
pared, as  not  to  do  away  with  the  law  stage  that  is  prece- 
dent, but  must  let  them  both  exist  together,  to  act 
concurrently  on  the  world.  And  this  is  done  by  the  obe- 
dience of  Christ,  obedience  unto  death.  Who  can  say  or 
think  that  God  yields  up  his  law,  in  the  forgiveness 
of  sins,  when  the  "Word  incarnate,  having  it  on  him  as  a 
bond  of  love,  the  same  that  our  human  sin  has  broken, 
renders  up  his  life  to  it,  and  bows  to  the  awful  passion 
of  the  cross,  that  he  may  fulfill  its  requirements.  Mag- 
nified and  made  honorable,  by  such  a  contribution  of  re- 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       388 

«pect,  no  free  remission  or  removal  of  penalties  running 
against  us,  can  be  felt  to  shake  its  authority. 

It  is  hardly  necessary  to  suggest  the  fact,  that  Christian- 
ity is  radically  distinguished,  in  this  matter  of  justifica- 
tion, from  the  philosophies  and  the  known  religions.  They 
see  nothing  in  sin,  or  its  penal  disorders  that  requires  a 
distinctly  supernatural  remedy;  or,  when  they  are  re- 
moved, any  apparent  infringement  of  law  and  justice. 
They  only  think  to  make  men  better  by  something  done 
upon  the  natural  footing ;  which,  if  they  can  do,  they 
have  no  farther  concern.  They  have  no  such  conception 
of  a  twofold  economy  of  God  as  makes  it  a  matter  of 
consequence  to  see  that,  when  he  forgives,  the  law  is  saved 
to  the  world  and  kept  on  foot,  as  an  element  of  training 
•«id  discipline.  If  they  speak  of  pardon,  it  is  no  such 
pardon  as  partakes  a  judicial  character.  Or  if  they  speak 
of  expiation,  offering  up  their  children,  it  may  be,  to  buy 
the  release  of  their  sin,  it  is  the  passions  of  their  God  they 
seek  to  arrest,  and  not  his  desecrated  authority  they  will 
sanctify.  They  have  no  care  for  law,  and  no  suspicion 
that  their  God  has  any.  They  have  no  conception  of  any 
such  solemn  relations  between  their  sin  and  the  eternal 
government  of  the  world,  as  creates  a  difficulty  in  the  way 
of  releasing  their  punishment.  No  difficulty  is  appre- 
hended, save  in  the  ill-nature  of  their  God ;  and  they  ex- 
pect to  appease  him  by  giving  him  pains  enough,  and 
gory  bodies  enough  of  the  innocent,  to  satisfy  him.  But 
the  Christian  truth  is  deeper  in  its  reasons,  and  has  a  more 
benign  character.  It  comes  into  the  world  as  a  divine  ad- 
vent, to  fulfill  a  second  stage  in  the  moral  economy  of  ho- 
liness. As  the  law  begins  with  nature,  so  this  finishes 
with  supernatural  grace.  As  one  binds,  the  other  liber- 


384     NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

ates ;  as  one  kills,  the  other  makes  alive ;  and  yet  so  tem- 
pered are  they  both,  that  they  are  kept  in  perpetual  action 
together.  Let  the  philosophers  and  human  teachers  show 
as  that  they  have  some  comprehension  of  the  great  prob- 
lem of  life,  and  of  God's  relation  to  it,  equally  compre- 
hensive in  its  breadth,  and  deep  in  its  reasons. 

5.  It  is  another  of  the  grand  distinctions  of  Christianity 
that  it  sets  up  a  kingdom  of  God  on  earth.  It  is  called 
"  the  kingdom  of  God  "  or  "  of  heaven  "  because  the  or- 
ganic force  by  which  so  many  wills  and  finally  all  man- 
kind are  to  be  gathered  into  unity,  is  not  in  nature,  but 
comes  down  out  of  heaven,  in  the  person  of  Christ  the 
king.  It  is  very  natural  that  the  different  political  organ- 
izations of  the  world  should  be  employed  figuratively,  as 
terms  of  representation,  in  matters  not  political.  Thus 
we  have  theoretic  commonwealths,  and  ideal  republics. 
Truth  is  conceived  as  an  empire.  In  the  natural  sci- 
ences we  have  what  are  called  three  kingdoms,  the  ani- 
mal, and  vegetable,  and  mineral.  But  here  we  have, 
what  is  not  elsewhere  conceived,  a  supernatural  kingdom 
in  souls,  the  kingdom  of  God ;  a  real,  living  polity,  organ- 
ized by  a  real  king,  and  swayed  and  propagated  by  the 
powers  of  truth  and  love,  centered  in  his  divine  person. 
Jesus  coming  into  the  world,  as  the  incarnate  Word  of 
God,  brings  a  new  force  with  him,  entering  into  souls  as 
the  advent  of  a  new  divine  power.  In  him  therefore 
begins,  of  course,  a  new  organization,  the  kingdom  of 
God  in  souls — righteousness,  and  peace,  and  joy  in  the 
Holy  Ghost.  This  accordingly  is  the  great  thought  of 
Christianity — the  kingdom  of  God ;  the  implanting  of  a 
divine  rule  in  lost  men,  and  the  gathering  in,  at  last,  of 
all  people  and  kindreds  of  the  earth,  into  a  vast, 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       385 

universal  order  of  peace  and  truth  under  Christ  the 
anointed  king. 

The  fact  grows  out  of  the  incarnation,  so  that  when 
Jesus  is  about  to  appear,  the  kingdom  of  heaven  is  at 
hand.  No  other  religion,  no  priest  or  seer,  no  avatar  of 
deity,  has  ever  raised  such  a  conception.  It  is  the  peculiar 
thought  or  fact  of  Christianity.  And  yet,  daring  as  the 
proposition  is,  so  extravagant  that  no  mere  man  could 
make  it  without  a  charge  of  lunacy,  Christ  undertakes  it — 
Christ,  the  Nazarene  carpenter — and  what  is  more,  as- 
sumes the  dominion  and  makes  his  kingdom  good.  And 
yet,  if  he  could  not  make  it  good,  his  incarnation  could  not 
stand,  as  an  accepted  fact.  So  closely  interwoven  are  these 
two,  the  incarnate  appearing,  and  the  kingdom  of  God. 

6.  The  Holy  Spirit  also  is  a  Christian  conception,  stand- 
ing in  profound  agreement  with  the  supernatural  fact  of 
the  gospel.  As  Christ,  incarnate,  is  a  supernatural  em- 
bodiment, or  manifestation  localized  in  space,  so  the  Holy 
Spirit  is  a  supernatural  indwelling  force,  by  which  Christ 
is  perpetuated  in  the  world,  universalized  in  all  localities, 
and  brought  nigh  to  every  being,  in  every  place.  And 
that  there  may  be  no  mistake  regarding  the  supernatural 
character  of  his  agency,  he  is  represented  as  being  inau- 
gurated by  external  signs,  and  by  gifts  of  utterance  and 
healing,  that  transcend  all  human  power.  He  is  not  to 
be  confounded,  in  this  respect,  with  conceptions  often  ta- 
ken up  by  the  eastern  sages  and  philosophers,  that  are 
analogous  in  form,  but  really  suppose,  in  their  minds,  no 
agency  of  God,  save  that  which  is  implied,  in  his  omni- 
present dominion  over  nature.  "  God,  they  conceived,  per- 
meates or  passes  through  all  things,"*  and  they  called  him. 

*  Cud.  II.,  498. 
33 


386 

in  this  view,  "the  divine  spirit"*  Thus  Apuleius  says, 
that  "nothing  is  so  excellent,  or  great  in  power,  as  to  be 
content  with  its  own  nature  alone,  void  of  the  divine 
aid  or  influence."  Philoponus,  with  our  very  point  of 
need  in  his  eye,  calls  what  should  be  the  Spirit,  simply  a 
Providence.  "  Though  the  soul  be  lapsed  into  a  preter- 
natural or  unnatural  state,  still  it  is  yet  not  neglected  by 
Providence,  but  has  a  constant  care  taken  of  it,  in  order  to 
its  recovery."f  Seneca  distinctly  conceives  a  divine 
spirit,  active  in  us,  and  yet  this  spirit  dwindles  into  a  min- 
ister only  of  natural  retribution.  "The  sacred  spirit 
dwells  in  us,  observer  of  our  evil  things,  guardian  of 
our  good,  and  he  treats  us  as  we  treat  him.":}:  None  of 
these  conceptions  really  meet  the  case  of  t,  supernatural 
religion.  This  demands  a  Spirit  engaged  to  deliver  and 
competent  to  deliver  from  the  lapse  of  nature,  by  acting 
on  the  fallen  subject,  and  separating  him  from  the  re- 
tributive action  of  natural  causes;  dwelling  in  him  thus, 
holding  him  up,  guiding  him  on,  extricating  his  liberty, 
and  witnessing  in  him,  as  a  divine  revelation  to  his  con- 
sciousness. 

There  is  also  a  profound  necessity  for  the  Holy  Spirit, 
thus  conceived,  in  the  miraculous  advent  of  Christ  itself. 
Christ  and  the  Spirit  are  complementary  forces,  and,  both 
together,  constitute  a  complete  whole;  such  a  kind  of 
whole  as  no  man,  or  myth,  or  accident  ever  invented. 
There  was  an  inherent  necessity  that  whatever  supernat- 
ural movement,  for  the  regeneration  of  man,  might  be  un- 
dertaken, should  include,  both  a  moral,  and  an  efficient 
agency;  one  before  the  understanding,  and  the  other  back 
of  it,  in  the  secret  springs  of  the  disordered  nature;  a  di- 

*  De  Mundo,  68.        f  Proem  in  Aristotle  de  Anima.        \  Ep.,  41. 


INTELLECTUALLY    COMPLETE.  387 

vine  object  clothed  in  beauty,  and  love,  and  justice,  to  be 
a  mold  into  which  the  soul  may  be  formed,  the  type  of 
a  divine  life  in  which  it  may  consentingly  be  crystallized ; 
an  efficient  grace,  working  within  the  soul,  preparing  it  to 
will  and  to  do,  and  rolling  back  the  currents  of  retribu- 
tive causes  in  it,  opening  it  to  the  power  of  its  glorious 
exemplar,  and  drawing  it  ever  into  that,  and  a  life  pro- 
ceeding from  it.  Without  the  former  before  the  mind, 
whatever  is  done  within,  by  efficiency,  would  be  only  a  work 
of  repair,  a  something  executed,  of  whose  way  or  method 
we  should  know  as  little  as  we  do  of  health  restored  by 
hidden  causes.  The  change  would  be  merely  physical, 
not  any  change  of  character  at  all,  more  than  when  the 
secretions  of  the  body  are  changed.  Without  the  latter — 
the  efficient  working — the  model  set  before  us  in  the  di- 
vine beauty  of  Christ  and  his  death,  would  find  us  dulled 
in  understanding,  blurred  in  perception,  and  held  fast  in 
the  penal  bondage  of  our  sins;  approving  the  good  before 
us  only  faintly,  desiring  it  coldly,  endeavoring  after  it,  if 
at  all,  impotently,  even  as  a  bird  might  try  to  rise  whose 
wings  are  cut. 

Such  is  the  profound  agreement  of  Christ  and  the  Holy 
Spirit.  One  is  naught  without  the  other.  Given  then  the 
fact  of  the  incarnation,  and  of  Christ's  human  appearing, 
by  whom  was  this  remarkable  counterpart  or  complement 
to  his  appearing  invented?  Who,  in  other  words,  con- 
trived the  day  of  pentecost?  Was  it  a  man?  was  it  sever- 
al men  of  only  common  faith?  or  was  is  done  by  the  loo^e 
gossip  of  a  wondering  and  credulous  age?  The  history 
says  that  Christ  himself  gave  the  Spirit,  by  direct  promise ; 
declaring  that  it  was  expedient  now  for  him  to  retire  from 
before  the  eyes,  that  the  Spirit  might  come,  and  taking  his 


388     NO    OTHER     SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

exemplar  into  men's  bosoms,  in  every  place,  all  over  the 
world,  shew  it  to  them  there.  Who  but  Christ  and 
he,  the  eternal  Son  of  God,  ever  generated  this  concep- 
tion? 

7.  The  doctrine  of  spiritual  regeneration,  propounded 
in  the  gospel,  is  another  point,  where  it  meets,  at  once, 
our  human  state  and  the  fact  of  a  supernatural  economy. 
This  truth  of  regeneration  supposes  a  loss  out  of  human 
nature,  of  the  seed-principle  of  a  good  and  holy  life; 
such  that  the  subject  has  really  no  good  in  his  character, 
and  never  can  by  himself  generate,  or  set  himself  in,  the 
principle  of  good.  He  can  do  many  good  things,  such  as 
men  call  good,  according  to  the  standard  of  ethics  or  of 
human  custom  (which  is  the  world's  law  of  virtue,)  and 
may  fitly  enough  be  praised,  for  the  comely  parts  that 
make  up  the  figure  of  his  life.  But  these  comelinesses  are 
a  virtue  of  items,  mere  will- works  that  proceed  from  no 
seed-principle  of  good.  Sometimes  even  the  worldly- 
minded  teachers  of  Christianity  take  up  with  this  kind 
of  virtue,  and  form  their  estimates  of  character,  by  in- 
specting the  atoms  collected  in  the  life.  Some  things 
done,  they  say,  are  good,  and  some  are  bad — the  good 
things  ought  to  be  increased,  and  the  bad  reduced.  They 
see,  of  course,  no  radical  defect  back  of  the  particulars 
noted,  and  therefore  no  need  of  a  radical  change  in  the 
life.  It  is  the  things  done  that  make  the  character,  and 
not  the  principle,  or  want  of  it,  that  gives  character  to  the 
things.  Their  gospel  is  even  more  shallow  than  a  pagan's 
philosophy.  According  to  Seneca,  who  penetrates  the 
real  ground- work  of  human  character — "  all  sins  are  in 
all  men,  but  do  not  appear  in  each  man.  He  that  hath 
one  sin,  hath  all.  "We  say  that  all  men  are  intemperate, 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       389 

avaricious,  luxurious,  malign — not  that  these  sins  appear 
in  all,  but  because  they  may  be,  yea,  are,  in  all,  though 
latent."*  Nothing  is  more  rational;  for,  if  nothing  is 
done  from  any  right  principle,  then  nothing  done  is  right, 
and  there  is  no  seed  of  right-doing  in  us.  The  doings 
may  be  kept  up  by  our  will,  without  any  seed-principle, 
so  attentively  and  punctiliously  as  even  to  become  tastes ; 
but  tastes  are  not  inspirations,  and  the  only  true  virtue 
of  man  is  that  which  he  does  from  God,  in  the  inspiration 
of  a  divine  liberty.  Separated  from  God,  he  is  a  monster, 
and  not  a  proper  man,  however  plausible  the  show  he 
makes.  And  this  is  the  effect  of  sin.  It  alienates  the 
subject  from  the  life  of  God.  Under  sin,  he  is  -no  more 
conscious  of  God,  as  in  his  normal  state  he  was  and  must 
be.  He  is  therefore  uncentralized  by  it,  dead  at  the  core. 
The  seed-principle  of  eternal  life  and  beauty  and  order  is 
gone.  He  centers  in  himself,  gravitates  downward  into, 
collapses  in,  himself;  and  he  could  as  easily  leap  out  of 
the  malstrom,  as  set  himself  in  the  true  liberty  and  seed- 
principle  of  holiness. 

It  is  therefore  declared,  as  the  necessary  condition  of 
our  salvation,  that  we  must  be  born  again,  born  not  of 
blood,  nor  of  the  will  of  the  flesh,  nor  of  the  will  of  man, 
but  of  God.  And  this  great  change  is  the  beginning  and 
spring  of  all  true  heavenly  virtue,  because  it  is  the  revela- 
tion of  God  in  the  soul.  Now  the  soul  is  conscious  of  God 
again.  Now  it  moves  in  the  line  of  the  divine  movement, 
which  is  moving  in  the  Spirit ;  which,  again,  is  the  inspi- 
ration of  liberty.  All  this,  of  course,  not  without  consent 
in  the  subject,  probably  not  without  some  deep  and  vio- 
lent struggles  on  his  part,  to  make  way  for  the  divine 

*Ep.,  50. 
33* 


390     NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

revelation.  He  must  offer  up  himself  to  the  divine  will, 
and  to  all  the  approaches  of  the  divine  love ;  and  this 
includes  much-  -a  removal  of  all  obstructions,  a  renuncia- 
tion of  self,  a  free  commitment  of  all  things  to  Christ, 
and  a  pliant,  unequivocal,  and  humble  faith  in  him.  But 
none  of  these  are,  by  themselves,  regeneration.  That  is 
of  God,  and  is,  in  fact,  the  soul's  assumption,  or  resump- 
tion, by  God.  To  say  that  it  is  a  change  of  the  soul's 
love,  is  only  another  version  of  the  same  truth ;  for  the 
love  is  changed  by  the  entering  in  of  God  and  his  love, 
into  the  soul's  faith.  For  love  is  of  God,  and  every  one 
that  loveth  is  born  of  God,  and  knoweth  God.  Old  things 
are  passed  away,  and  all  things  are  become  new;  because 
God  is  revealed  within,  changing,  of  course,  the  principle 
of  all  action,  and  the  meaning  of  all  experience.  That 
this  new  revelation  is  supernatural,  coinciding,  in  every 
thing  said  of  it,  with  the  grand  central  fact  of  the  incarna- 
tion, need  not  be  shown.  Enough  that  it  is  the  initiation 
of  a  sinner  and  alien  into  the  kingdom  of  God — except  a 
man  be  born  again,  he  can  not  see  the  kingdom  of  God. 

8.  The  Christian  doctrine  of  Providence  coincides,  also, 
with  the  fact  of  a  supernatural  work  in  the  redemption  of 
mankind.  It  assumes,  without  misgiving,  the  bold  con- 
ception of  a  supernatural  Providence,  under  which  the 
world  itself  is  ruled  in  the  interest  of  Christianity ;  a  con- 
ception that  will  be  verified  in  the  next  or  following  chap- 
ter, and  therefore  need  not  be  discussed  here.  Nothing 
more  is  necessary  to  our  present  purpose,  than  just  to  call 
attention  to  the  remarkable  fact  that  this  myth,  this  mar- 
yel  of  superstition,  this  gossip  of  miracle,  that  we  call 
Christianity,  dares  to  claim  the  government  of  the  world 
(as  in  real  consistency  it  should,)  in  its  interest,  and,  what 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       391 

is  more,  history,  as  we  shall  see,  audits  the  claim,  and 
makes  it  good. 

9.  We  name,  as  another  point  of  the  Christian  doctrine, 
strangely  and  surprisingly  coincident  with  the  supernatu- 
ral idea  of  the  plan,  introduced  by  the  incarnate  appear- 
ing of  Christ,  the  Trinity  of  God.  I  say,  strangely  and 
surprisingly  coincident,  because  the  last  thing  that  would 
occur  to  any  human  being,  in  the  exercise  of  his  natural 
wisdom,  would  be  the  introduction  of  a  new,  or  modified 
conception  of  God,  to  accommodate  the  new  fact  of  a 
gospel.  And  yet,  exactly  this  is  what  we  discover  in  the 
matter  of  that  gospel ;  and,  what  is  more,  having  the  fact 
before  us,  we  can  easily  enough  distinguish  a  practical 
reason  for  it,  in  the  requisite  instrumental  use,  or  handling 
of  that  gospel ;  or,  what  is  no  wise  different,  in  the  prac- 
tical adjustment  of  our  relations  to  God,  under  the  two- 
fold conditions  of  nature  and  grace,  in  which  he  is  now 
set  before  us. 

We  can  not  here  go  into  the  learning  of  this  great 
question.  Suffice  it  to  say,  that  the  Old  Testament  scrip- 
tures contain  the  rudiments  of  a  trinity,  and  that  the  Pla- 
tonic, Alexandrian,  and  Christian  trinities  are  either  sug- 
gested by,  or  developed  from  these  rudiments.  That  the 
Old  Testament  scriptures  are  prior  in  date,  even  by  hund- 
reds of  years,  to  the  writings  of  Plato,  is  not  to  be  denied. 
The  east  was  full  of  traditions  from  these  scriptures,  and 
he  himself,  a  traveler  in  those  parts,  professed  that  he  de- 
rived many  things  from  the  traditions  of  the  "  Barbarians." 
It  can  not  therefore  be  charged  that  the  Christian  trinity, 
as  given  by  Christ,  in  the  baptismal  formula,  was  origin- 
ally a  product  of  natural  reason,  and  was  transferred 
from  Plato's  theosophy.  No  trinity  was  ever  suggested 


392      NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

by  mere  thought,  or  generated  by  mere  natural  reason. 
Reason  takes  the  road  of  unity,  and  the  conception  of  a 
triad  comes  out,  if  at  all,  from  the  process  of  a  supernat- 
ural revelation.  Thus  came  the  Christian  trinity,  as  a 
fact  historically  developed ;  first  in  the  Almighty  Creator 
and  Father,  the  Jehovah-angel  or  Word  of  the  Lord,  and 
the  Holy  Spirit,  of  the  Old  Testament;  then  in  the 
Father,  Son,  and  Holy  Ghost,  of  the  New.  It  is  a  concep- 
tion generated  by  supernatural  transactions,  and  is  needed 
to  accommodate  the  uses  of  a  supernatural  salvation. 

Thus,  if  there  were  but  one  economy,  or  ministration 
of  God,  known  to  us,  viz.,  that  of  nature,  we  should 
never  need,  and,  in  fact,  should  never  have,  any  concep- 
tion of  the  divine  being,  save  that  which  is  named  by  the 
terms  God,  the  Almighty,  the  Creator,  and  others,  con- 
formed to  the  notion  of  the  divine  unity.  But,  having 
fallen  into  a  state  of  retributive  disorder,  from  which  we 
can  be  delivered  only  by  a  supernatural  salvation,  we  are 
obliged  to  adjust  ourselves  toward  God  as  filling  two 
economies,  and  that  requires  a  new  machinery  of  thought. 
If  now  we  have  only  the  single  term  God,  we  must  speak 
of  God  as  dealing  with  God,  or  of  the  grace-force  of  God,  as 
delivering  from  the  nature-force  of  God.  If  the  work 
includes  an  incarnation,  as  we  suppose  it  must,  then  it 
must  be  God  sending  God  into  the  world ;  and,  if  it 
includes  a  renovating,  new-revealing  agency  within,  then 
we  can  only  go  to  God  to  give  us  God,  and  ask  of  God  to 
roll  back  the  retributive  causations  of  God,  that  are  fast- 
ening their  penal  bondage  on  us.  All  which,  we  may 
.see,  is  a  method  too  clumsy  and  confused  to  serve,  at  all, 
the  practical  uses  of  the  salvation  provided.  There  is,  in 
short,  no  intellectual  machinery,  in  a  close  theoretic  mon 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       393 

otheism,  for  any  such  thing  as  a  work  of  grace,  or  super- 
natural redemption.  In  the  Christian  trinity,  this  want  is 
supplied.  First,  we  have  the  Father,  setting  God  before 
us  as  the  author  and  ground  of  all  natural  things  and 
causes.  Then  we  have  the  Son  and  the  Spirit,  which 
represent  what  God  may  do,  acting  on  the  lines  of  causes 
in  nature ;  one  as  coming  into  nature  from  without,  to  be 
incarnate  in  it,  the  other  as  working  internally  in  the 
power  of  the  Son,  to  dispense  to  the  soul  what  he  ad- 
dressed outwardly  to  human  thought,  and  configure  the  soul 
to  him,  as  an  exemplar  embraced  by  its  faith.  Then, 
putting  our  trust  in  the  Son,  as  coming  down  from  God, 
offering  himself  before  God,  going  up  to  Him,  interceding 
before  Him,  reigning  with  Him,  by  Him  accepted,  honored, 
glorified;  invoking  also  God  and  Christ  to  send  down 
the  Spirit,  and  let  him  be  the  power  of  a  new  indwelling 
life,  breathing  health  into  our  diseases,  and  rolling  back  the 
penal  currents  of  justice  to  free  us  of  our  sin,  we  are  able  to 
act  ourselves  before  the  new  salvation,  so  as  to  receive  the 
full  force  of  it.  Having  these  instruments  of  thought  and 
feeling  and  faith  toward  God,  and  suffering  no  foolish 
quibbles  of  speculative  logic  to  plague  us,  asking  never 
how  many  Gods  there  are  ?  nor  how  it  is  possible  for  one 
to  send  another,  act  before  another,  reconcile  us  to  an- 
other? but,  assured  that  God  is  one  eternally,  however 
multiform  our  conceptions  of  his  working,  how  lively 
and  full  and  blessed  is  the  converse  we  get,  through  these 
living  personations,  so  pliant  to  our  use  as  finite  men,  so 
gloriously  accommodated  to  the  twofold  economy  of  our 
salvation  as  sinners !  Is  this  now  a  conception  gotten  up 
by  man,  upon  his  natural  level  ?  Is  there  any  philosophic, 
theosophic,  or  mythologic  mark  upon  it  ? 


394     NO    OTHER    SUPERNATURAL    RELIGION 

We  have  thus  brought  into  review  as  many  as  nine 
of  the  principal  facts  and  prominent  articles  of  Chris- 
tianity, and  find  them  crystallizing  into  a  perfectly  har- 
monious and  orderly  system,  round  the  one  central  fact 
of  a  supernatural  religion,  initiated  in  the  incarnate  ap- 
pearing of  Christ.  His  work  is  called  a  gospel  on  this 
account,  precisely  as  it  should  be,  and  yet  by  no  human 
suggestion  would  be.  It  is  also  called  a  salvation,  differ- 
ing from  all  theosophies  and  mythologies,  in  the  fact  that 
it  is  a  supernatural  restorative  force,  and,  in  that  view,  the 
only  real  salvation  ever  known.  It  brings  the  salvation 
also  to  faith  and  hangs  it  on  faith,  as  by  the  conditions  of 
the  case  it  must,  and  as  no  other  known  scheme  of  virtue 
does.  It  justifies  also  by  faith,  communicating,  in  this 
manner,  the  righteousness  of  God  and  preparing  acquittal 
in  a  way  that  keeps  the  law  in  full  force,  as  the  nature- 
side  and  necessary  element  of  human  training.  A  king- 
dom of  God,  or  of  heaven,  is  erected  by  it  on  earth ;  in 
which  we  see,  by  the  name  itself,  that  the  reigning  force 
of  the  new  kingdom  is  not  of  nature,  but  from  without 
and  above  the  world.  The  Hob7  Spirit  is  inaugurated  as 
a  conception  of  the  divine  working,  different  from  that 
which  is  included  in  the  laws  of  nature,  and  delivering 
from  the  retributive  action  of  those  laws.  This  deliver- 
ance, connected  with  a  renovated  principle  of  life  in  the  soul, 
it  calls  regeneration,  conceiving,  in  a  way  peculiar  to  itself, 
that,  without  the  change  thus  denominated,  as  a  second 
birth,  or  newly  regenerated  life,  there  is  and  can  be  no  seed- 
principle  of  heavenly  virtue.  Here  too  is  proposed,  for  the 
first  time  in  the  world,  a  properly  supernatural  Providence  ; 
that  is,  a  Providence  which  governs  the  world,  in  the  in- 
terest of  salvation,  or  regenerated  holiness.  Accordantly 


INTELLECTUALLY  COMPLETE.       895 

also  with  such  a  conception  of  God,  as  presiding  over  a 
double  administration  of  law  and  grace,  nature  and  the 
supernatural,  the  divine  unity  is  reproduced  as  trinity ;  in 
which,  whatever  may  be  thought  of  other  trinities,  Chris- 
tianity holds,  at  least,  the  honorable  distinction  of  being 
the  only  doctrine  that  conceives  a  trinity,  in  and  through, 
and  practically  operative  with,  a  double  economy  of 
divine  government. 

Is  there  not  something  remarkable  in  this  general  con- 
sent of  the  Christian  names,  facts,  ideas,  and  doctrines? 
and  the  more  remarkable  that  it  appears  in  matters  where 
we  should  least  look  for  it,  if  left  to  ourselves  and  the 
natural  processes  of  our  thoughts?  And  still  the  list 
might  be  indefinitely  extended.  Thus  preaching  is  to  be 
the  means  of  propagation  for  this  gospel,  and  what  but  a 
supernatural  gift  to  the  world  could  ever  be  heralded  or 
preached?  Prophesying  in  the  Spirit  is  a  supernatural  ut- 
terance. The  ministry  are  conceived  to  be  set  apart  by 
the  Holy  Spirit,  which  is  true  of  no  other  class  of  teachers, 
on  the  footing  of  reason,  or  of  natural  science.  Spiritual 
gifts  belong  to  a  plan  transcending  nature.  The  sacraments 
are  consecrated  vehicles  of  grace  and  power.  Visions 
and  revelations  are  from  above.  The  resurrection  of  the 
dead  is  not  of  nature.  The  history  of  the  original  propa- 
gation of  Christianity,  taken  as  a  whole,  is  in  fact  a 
miraculous  process,  and  nothing  less.  In  short  the  whole 
fabric  of  the  Christian  institution — thought,  name,  office, 
fact,  and  doctrine— centers,  we  discover,  in  the  one  grand 
idea  of  a  supernatural  movement  on  the  world.  There  is 
nothing  eccentric,  that  will  not  fall  into  the  general  aim 
of  the  plan,  and  chime  with  it ;  no  fantastic  matter  that  ia 
unreducible,  as  we  should  expect,  if  human  wisdom  only 


396  THIS    COMPLETED    SCHEME 

had  undertaken  the  devising  and  the  adjustment  of  the 
parts.  As  Napoleon  noticed,  with  an  impression  of  won- 
der, "one  thing  follows  another  like  the  ranks  of  a  celes- 
tial army."  He  knew  what  an  army  was,  and  the  order 
of  a  well-set  discipline,  but  he  finds  a  higher,  even 
celestial  order,  which  his  phalanx  is  a  thing  too  loose  to 
represent,  in  the  gloriously  compacted  truths  of  a  heaven- 
born,  supernatural  faith. 

Even  Mr.  Hennel  admits  a  correspondent  impression  of 
the  compact  unity,  and  the  admirable  working  order  of 
the  Christian  plan  ;  admitting,  strangely  enough,  that  it  ex- 
cels all  other  fruits  of  human  learning  and  philosophy  in 
this  respect,  and  yet  conceiving  that,  with  all  its  high  pre- 
tensions of  a  supernatural  origin,  and  the  undeniably 
supernatural  guise  in  which  it  stands,  it  is  itself  a  strictly 
human  product!  He  says,  "Christianity  has  presented 
to  the  world  a  system  of  moral  excellence.  It  has 
led  forth  the  principles  of  humanity  and  benevolence 
from  the  recesses  of  the  schools  and  groves,  and  com- 
pelled them  to  take  an  active  part  in  the  affairs  of  life. 
It  has  consolidated  the  moral  and  religious  sentiments  into 
a  more  definite,  influential  form  than  had  before  existed, 
and  thereby  constituted  an  engine  that  has  worked  power- 
fully toward  humanizing  and  civilizing  the  world."* 
Moral  and  religious  sentiments !  as  if  it  were  only  a  com- 
pact of  these  and  such  like  human  qualities,  when  it  is 
talking  all  the  while  of  the  incarnation,  of  faith,  of  justi- 
fication, of  the  better  covenant,  of  regeneration,  of  the  resur- 
rection of  the  dead,  and  commanding  its  apostles  to  preach 
the  trinity  of  God !  Are  these  staple  matters  of  Christianity 
our  "moral  and  religious  sentiments?"  "Consolidated" 

*  Inquiry,  p.  48. 


CAN    NOT    BE    OF    MAN.  397 

also  they  are  "into  a  more  definite  and  influential  form  !" 
Is  it  in  such  lofty  and  transcendent  spiritualities  as  these 
which  are  named,  that  our  mere  human  notions  are  wont 
to  get  consolidated?  And  why  could  not  the  philoso- 
phers, such  men  as  Plato,  Socrates,  Aristotle,  Cicero,  and 
Seneca,  consolidate  such  human  notions  as  well,  or  to  as 
good  effect,  as  the  rude  fisherman  of  Galilee  ?  And  yet 
what  is  there  of  solidity,  in  giving  to  these  mere  natural 
things  or  sentiments,  a  form  so  fantastical  and  flighty, 
and  calling  them  by  names  to  which  no  human  thought 
can  reach?  Doubtless  Christianity  is  "more  influen- 
tial," but  it  is  so,  because  it  is  so  truly  unsolid,  so  spir- 
itual, and  so  visibly  superior  to  the  world,  and  to  all  those 
dull  imbecilities  sometimes  called  religious  sentiments. 
God  is  in  Christ,  reconciling  the  world  unto  himself — that 
is  influential,  that  is  power ! 

And  now  the  question  is,  whence  comes  this  super- 
natural, world-transcending  institute,  erected  among  us, 
in  so  many  tokens  of  a  perfect  intelligence  ?  Whence 
this  more  than  logical,  this  organic  unity  in  things  so  re- 
mote, and  to  mere  human  thought  undiscoverable ;  for  if 
it  be  possible  that  human  thought  should  stumble  on  a 
fiction  so  magnificent,  it  certainly  could  not  frame  it  into 
order,  and  offer  it  as  a  truth  of  salvation.. 

In  adjusting  our  answer  to  this  question,  it  is  important, 
first  of  all,  to  observe  that  the  Christian  truth  has  obviously 
nothing  of  the  form  of  a  scheme  thought  out  by  the 
natural  understanding.  It  is  not  metaphysical  or  deduct- 
ive. It  proposes  itself  to  faith,  under  laws  of  expres- 
sion, and  is  plainly  seen  to  be  no  product  of  mental  analy- 
sis, or  constructive  logic.  It  has  the  form  not  of  some- 
thing generated  fo/,  but  of  something  offered  to,  the  world. 

34 


398 

It  comes  down  into  history,  as  it  represents,  from  a  point 
above  history ;  standing  out  in  symbols  of  fact  and  ex- 
pression, that  are  to  report  and  verify  themselves.  It  is, 
in  form,  a  something  to  be  believed,  not  a  something  rea- 
soned— incarnation,  love,  miracle,  a  calling  of  God  after 
men,  a  communication  of  the  divine  nature.  Admitting, 
as  we  safely  enough  may,  for  the  present,  that  criticism 
discovers  tokens  of  human  activity  and  frailty  in  the 
record,  still  the  operative  system  stands  forth  in  its  own 
simple  confidence,  in  its  own  heavenly  form,  as  a  gospel 
to  the  world,  and  as  such  it  reveals  the  solid  unity,  the 
glorious  depth  of  harmony  and  self-understanding,  we 
have  discovered  in  its  doctrine.  It  speaks  as  if  it  never 
had  a  thought  of  system,  and  yet  reveals  a  reach  of  system 
wider  than  all  human  philosophy. 

But  this  will  be  denied,  and  still  it  will  be  maintained 
that  this  unconscious,  inartificial  fabric  is  a  work  of  art. 
That,  if  we  know  any  thing  of  what  is  in  man,  is  impos- 
sible. If  the  scheme  were  down  upon  the  footing  of  na- 
ture, as  on  the  face  it  declares  it  is  not,  then  it  might  not 
be  difficult  to  admit  that  human  skill,  or  even  the  silent 
process  of  human  history,  as  in  the  case  of  the  English 
common  law,  should  shape  it  into  a  system  of  apparent 
order  and  scientific  unity.  But  being  a  scheme  supernat- 
ural, not  even  the  first  facts  or  premises  were  included 
in  our  knowledge,  as  derived  from  our  natural  expe- 
rience, and  required  therefore  to  be  invented  by  us ;  and  to 
suppose  that  our  human  faculties,  breaking  over  the  con- 
fines in  this  manner  of  all  knowledge,  could  there  build 
up,  in  the  cloud-land  of  unknown,  merely  imagined  fact,  a 
sober,  thoroughly  coherent  scheme  of  truth  and  renovat- 
ing life,  adjusting  the  infinite  to  the  finite,  law  to  mercy, 


CA1ST    NOT    BE    OF    MAN.  399 

discord  and  death  to  liberty  and  salvation,  and  setting  all 
its  grand  array  of  facts,  names,  doctrines,  and  powers  in  a 
frame  of  solid  and  compact  unity — such  a  supposition  is 
too  extravagant  to  be  rationally  entertained.  It  is  sup- 
posing that  we  are  able  to  build,  in  the  realm  of  fiction  it- 
self, a  vaster  and  more  solid  economy  of  intellectual  and 
practical  truth,  than  has  ever  yet  been  built  on  the  basis 
of  experience. 

Three  suppositions  may  be  raised  in  regard  to  the  mat- 
ter in  question ;  viz.,  that  the  work  is  all  of  man ;  that  it 
is  partly  of  man ;  and  that  it  is  all  of  God.  The  first  of 
these  we  have  discussed  already;  for,  if  such  a  work 
could  not  be  invented,  much  less  could  it  be  accomplished 
by  the  hap-hazard  process  of  myth  and  wild  tradition. 
The  second,  which  supposes,  some  central  point  of  a  su- 
pernatural plan  being  given — the  fact,  for  example,  of  the 
incarnation — that  this  fact  was  wrought  up  by  the  human 
understanding,  through  a  course  of  active  development, 
into  the  complete  scheme  and  perfect  unity  we  have  de- 
scribed, need  not  be  particularly  discussed,  because  it 
allows  the  fact  of  a  supernatural  root  and  beginning, 
which  is  the  principal  matter  in  question. 

The  third  supposition  is  the  only  one  that  is  rationally 
tenable ;  viz.,  that  this  grand  out-birth  of  a  new  divine 
economy,  called  the  gospel,  is,  in  fact,  supernatural,  and 
stands  in  the  compact  order  of  a  complete  intellectual 
unity,  because  it  was  given  by  a  comprehending  mind 
equal  to  the  reach  of  the  plan.  Not  that  every  thing 
written,  or  advanced  in  the  canonical  books  of  the  New 
Testament,  is  historic  fact,  or  infallible  truth — our  present 
supposition  does  not  reach  so  far  as  that,  but  leaves  a 
space  to  be  filled  up  by  other  kinds  of  argument — it 


400  THIS    COMPLETED    SCHEME 

simply  supposes  that  all  such  prominent  ideas,  tokens, 
facts,  and  doctrines  as  we  have  .named — that  is,  every 
thing  which  goes  to  shape  the  new  economy,  as  being 
integral  to  it — is  brought  into  knowledge  and  published 
to  the  world  supernaturally.  And  the  proof  is  that  al- 
ready given ;  viz.,  that  the  consent  of  so  many  parts  and 
tokens  in  one  central  fact  and  design,  can  not  otherwise 
be  accounted  for,  and  is  otherwise  truly  impossible. 
The  human  understanding  may  frame  a  theory  out  of 
data,  or  phenomena,  supplied  by  experience;  it  may 
scheme  out  a  system  or  hypothesis,  regarding  matters 
known,  that  is  coherent,  and  stands  in  the  complete  unity 
of  reason ;  but  it  is  a  very  different  thing  to  make  up  a 
supernatural  kosmos  of  fact,  doctrine,  idea,  relatively 
consistent,  and  converging,  all,  on  the  common  point  of  a 
spiritual  renovation  of  souls.  That,  we  may  affirm  with 
entire  confidence,  is  not  within  the  compass  of  any  human 
power. 

Of  this,  too,  we  have  abundant  evidence,  besides  that 
which  rests  in  any  mere  judgment  of  human  capacity. 
The  whole  religious  and  mythologic  history  of  the  world 
is  such  evidence.  In  the  first  place,  every  pagan  religion, 
every  mythology,  is  in  form  a  supernatural  machinery ;  a 
fact  which  Mr.  Parker  and  others  who  endeavor  to  reduce 
Christianity  to  a  common  footing  with  such  mythologies, 
and  so  to  a  mere  product  of  nature,  have  strangely  over- 
looked. In  the  next  place,  what  one  of  these  pagan  su- 
pernaturalisms  has  ever  proposed  the  problem  of  salva- 
tion, or  the  deliverance  of  man  from  sin  and  the  restora- 
tion of  his  divine  consciousness  ? — the  only  real  problem, 
manifestly,  that  requires  to  be  supernaturally  solved. 
Again,  what  one  of  these  mythologies  proposes  to  erect 


CAN    NOT    BE    OF    MAN.  401 

the  kingdom  of  God  among  men,  or  has  any  consistent 
and  concentrated  action  bearing  on  that  one  result,  or 
indeed  on  any  other  ?  What  one  of  them,  we  may  ask, 
even  proposes  a  pure  morality  ?  So  plainly  impossible  is 
it  for  man,  or  human  history,  to  develop  any  intelligent 
and  rationally  harmonious  scheme  of  supernaturalism. 

And  yet  we  have  more  convincing  proofs  even  than 
these.  See  what  figure  is  made  by  Mormonism,  Moham- 
medanism, and  the  Eomish  Church,  all  of  which  begin 
with  supernatural  conceptions,  or  data,  furnished  by 
Christianity.  If  we  will  ascertain  what  it  is  in  man  to  do, 
in  the  way  of  composing  supernatural  verities,  see  what 
additions  or  amendments  these  have  furnished.  The  new 
faith  of  Mormon  pretends  to  be  Christian  still,  only  it  is  a 
more  complete  and  finished  form  of  the  Christian  truth. 
But  the  ungodly  and  profane  mummeries  it  has  added,  in 
the  new  revelations  of  the  book,  the  new  priesthood,  and 
the  new  sainthood,  all  of  which  are  boasted  and  accepted 
as  improvements,  it  is  very  plain  are  only  mockeries  of 
all  the  practical  aims  of  the  gospel,  and  of  the  virtues  it 
came  to  restore.  Mohammedanism,  borrowing  from  the 
Christian  scriptures,  proposes  for  its  aim,  to  perfect  in  men 
a  heavenly  virtue.  But  the  doctrine  of  fatalism  it  estab- 
lishes, forbids,  at  the  outset,  every  struggle  after  such 
heavenly  virtue,  and  the  sensual  paradise  it  promises, 
generates,  as  far  as  it  goes,  a  habit  opposite  to  every  thing 
in  the  nature  of  that  virtue. 

But  these,  it  will  be  said,  are  not,  in  any  proper  sense, 
developments  of  the  Christian  supernaturalism,  at  which 
they  begin ;  but  tricks  of  knavery,  or  ravings  of  fanati- 
cism. Pass  then  to  the  Eomish  Church,  and  see  what  the 
venerable,  slow-moving  wisdom  of  ages  can  do.  Here 

34* 


402  THIS    COMPLETED    SCHEME 

we  meet  the  councils,  age  after  age,  in  their  high  delib- 
erations. All  the  learning  of  the  world,  for  many  hund- 
reds of  years,  is  here  concentrated.  Heretical  additions 
are  here  carefully  scented,  and  promptly  burnt  out  by  the 
fires  of  purification.  All  determinations  pass  by  debate, 
and  sometimes  by  the  debates  of  ages.  The  history  is  a 
process  slow  and  laborious,  like  that  which  generates  the 
common  or  the  civil  law ;  and  the  result  is  even  called  a 
development  of  Christianity.  What  then  do  we  find? 
Is  the  glorious  order  and  regenerative  unity  of  the  gospel, 
as  a  power  of  salvation,  preserved  and  augmented,  or  is 
it  overlaid  and  stifled,  by  a  mass  of  antichristian  inven- 
tions and  corrupt  traditions,  that  have  really  no  agree- 
ment with  it?  And  yet  they  are  all  introduced  to  give 
it  greater  effect.  The  exorcisms  were  to  expel  devils;  but 
the  solemn  trifling  of  the  ceremony  only  turned  the  disci- 
ple away  from  faith,  to  look  after  powers  of  magic.  The 
amulets  were  to  be  pledges,  on  the  person,  of  God's  keep- 
ing and  defense,  against  devils  and  all  disasters ;  but  these 
were  accepted  as  charms  also  of  magic.  The  sacrament 
itself  of  Christ's  body  and  blood,  ordained  to  be  the  ve 
hicle  and  sign  of  a  co-operative  grace  to  the  recipient, 
must  needs  be  farther  intensified  in  its  power,  and,  to  thia 
end,  was  transmuted  into  the  very  substance  of  Christ,  by 
a  perpetual  miracle ;  which  miracle,  again,  was  taken  as 
another  feat  of  priestly  magic,  and  watched  as  a  pious 
incantation  by  the  receiver.  Celibacy  and  monastic  re- 
tirement were  to  beget  a  higher  and  more  superlative 
virtue;  turning  out,  instead,  to  be  only  the  scandal  and 
disgust  of  the  world.  Pictures  were  added,  to  assist  the 
mind  in  conceiving  things  high  and  remote;  operating, 
instead,  as  a  stricture  upon  it,  and  chaining  it  down  to  a 


CAN    NOT    BE    OP    MAN.  403 

new  antichristian  idolatry.  Ascetic  practices  were  added, 
to  chasten  the  soul  and  refine  its  spiritual  fires;  only 
kindling,  instead,  the  fires  of  a  new  fanaticism.  The  way 
to  Christ  would  be  more  easy,  it  was  conceived,  if  his 
mother  could  be  invoked  to  present  the  cause  of  the  sup- 
pliant ;  and  lo !  Christianity  becomes  no  more  a  gospel  of 
life,  but  a  fantastic  scheme  of  Mariolatry.  A  vicar  of 
Christ  was  wanted,  many  thought,  to  represent  him  on 
earth,  and  be  a  visible  mark  for  their  faith ;  but  the  vicar 
displaced  the  principal,  becoming  a  mark,  instead,  of  su- 
perstitious homage,  and  a  receiver  of  deific  honors. 

And  thus  we  have  a  proof  irresistible  of  what  man 
can  do,  in  the  way  of  thinking  out,  or  dressing  up,  a 
scheme  of  supernatural  truth.  Four  or  five  common 
persons,  without  learning  or  culture,  assisted  by  one 
other  distinguished  by  higher  advantages,  have  pre- 
sented, we  have  seen,  such  a  scheme.  All  the  parts  they 
have  set  in  harmony  with  each  other,  and  made  them 
crystallize  into  the  perfect  unity  of  the  plan.  But  here 
we  find  all  the  great  minds  of  the  church,  the  learned,  the 
wise,  the  prudent,  and  even  the  good,  slowly  elaborating 
their  additions,  or,  as  some  will  say,  their  developments, 
of  the  doctrine  handed  down  to  them,  and  producing  just 
that  which  has  no  agreement  whatever  with  its  genuine 
import  and  the  real  movement  it  proposes — -joining,  as 
the  classic  poet  says,  a  "horse's  neck  to  a  man's  head," 
and  expanding  the  simple,  life-giving  truth,  into  such  the- 
atrical pomps  and  scholastic  wisdoms,  that  a  cap  and  bells 
would  scarcely  be  a  less  appropriate  honor. 

What,  then,  have  we  to  do,  after  such  a  reference  as 
this,  but  to  gather  up  all  these  prominent  facts,  ideas, 
names,  and  doctrines,  which  we  have  seen  coalesce  so  pep 


404  THE    SCHEME    NOT    OF    MAN. 

fectly  in  the  central  fact  of  a  supernatural  grace  for 
the  world,  composing,  when  taken  together,  the  total 
frame-work  and  complete  virtuality  of  the  gospel,  and 
say  that,  in  this  secret  and  every  where  present  water- 
mark, we  read  the  signature  of  God.  None  but  He 
could  have  organized  this  heavenly  kosmos  that  we  call 
the  gospel. 


CHAPTER  XIII. 

THE  WORLD  IS  GOVERNED  SITPERNATURALLY,  IN  THE 
INTEREST  OF  CHRISTIANITY. 

CHRISTIANITY,  as  planted  by  Christ,  is  a  divine  institute 
in  the  world,  the  particular  design  of  which  is  to  act  re- 
medially,  as  against  the  mischiefs  introduced  by  sin,  and 
propagated  by  the  retributive  causes  of  nature.  The  Holy 
Spirit  also  is,  by  the  supposition,  a  divine  force  or  deific 
agency  inaugurated  in  the  world,  to  carry  on,  through  all 
the  coming  ages,  this  same  new-creating  work.  Now,  as 
there  is  but  one  divine  being  or  God,  who  is  entered  thus 
into  so  great  a  work,  with  tokens  of  feeling  so  impressive- 
ly indicated,  it  follows  by  a  very  short  inference,  if  in- 
deed by  any  inference  at  all,  that  the  one  God  of  the 
world,  governing  it  always  accordantly  with  Himself,  must 
govern  it  in  the  interest  of  Christianity.  Christianity, 
plainly,  is  either  nothing  to  Him,  or  else  it  is  more  than 
any  secondary  thing;  the  hinge  of  his  counsel,  the  mis- 
sion of  his  love,  the  grand,  all-inclusive,  and  eternal  aim 
of  his  purposes.  And  if  this  be  true,  he  will  not  govern 
the  world  in  a  way  that  forgets  or  overlooks  Christianity, 
but  will  govern  it  rather  for  Christianity's  sake;  which, 
again,  is  the  same  as  to  say  that  he  will  govern  it  by  a  su- 
pernatural regimen,  even  as  Christianity  itself  is  a  super- 
natural institution. 

Exactly  this,  too,  is  the  assumption  of  Christ  himself. 
He  openly  claims  the  government  of  the  world,  as  being 
in  his  interest,  or  at  the  disposal  of  his  cause  and  king- 
dom; saying — "all  power  is  given  unto  me  in  heaven  and 


406  THE    TWO    KINDS 

in  earth."  He  is  also  declared  by  his  apostle  to  have  "  as- 
cended on  high,  leading  captivity  captive,"  that  he  might 
be  a  dispenser  of  divine  gifts  in  this  manner;  "for  God 
hath  set  him  at  his  own  right  hand,  in  the  heavenly  places, 
far  above  all  principality  and  power,  and  hath  put  all 
things  under  his  feet,  that  he  might  be  head  over  all  things 
to  the  Church."  He  also  publishes,  himself,  a  doctrine  of 
prayer  that  supposes  the  same  thing;  or  that,  if  any  one 
will  ask  in  his  name,  or  as  abiding  in  him  and  doing  his 
will,  he  shall  have  his  petition — guidance,  light,  deliver- 
ance, healing  of  the  sick,  support  against  enemies, 
power  to  work,  patience  to  suffer — every  thing  that  sup- 
poses the  government  to  be  enlisted,  as  a  supernatural 
Providence,  in  the  furtherance  of  his  Christian  welfare. 

Indeed  we  shall  not  sufficiently  understand  the  Christian 
ideas  of  Providence,  till  we  conceive  it  to  be  a  twofold 
scheme  of  order  and  divine  dispensation.  Nature,  in  the 
first  place,  is  a  kind  of  Providence,  being  so  adjusted  as  to 
meet  all  the  future  uses  it  can,  as  nature,  meet.  But  it 
requires  little  insight,  to  perceive  that  it  can  not  meet  those 
uses  that  suppose  a  need  of  deliverance  from  nature. 
Manifestly  nature  can  not  rescue  from  the  disorders,  pro- 
duced by  a  retributive  action  of  her  own  causes.  And  if 
all  God's  action  were  included  in  the  operations  of  nature, 
nothing  plainly  could  ever  be  done  for  man,  as  regards  the 
wants  of  his  sin,  the  cries  of  his  repentance,  or  the  strug- 
gles of  his  faith.  Nature  can  throw  him,  and  trample 
him,  by  her  retributive  causes,  but  she  has  no  help  to  give 
him  in  rising,  or  rolling  back  her  causes. 

On  this  subject  of  Providence,  there  is  much  of  unreg- 
ulated thought  and  crude  speculation.  Thus  it  is  a  greatly 
debated  question,  whether  there  is  a  special,  or  only  a  gen- 


OF    PEOVIDENCE.  407 

eral  Providence?  For  it  is  conceived,  by  a  certain  class, 
that  God  has  a  special  meaning  or  design,  in  some  few 
things  of  their  experience,  and  not  in  others.  This  plain- 
ly is  a  faith  of  credulity,  and  one  that  accommodates  God 
to  the  measures  of  human  ignorance.  Another  class,  who 
assume  to  be  more  philosophic,  holding  a  general,  and  de- 
nying a  special  Providence,  only  substitute  an  absurdity 
for  a  superstition ;  for  what  is  a  general  Providence,  that 
comprehends  no  special  Providence,  but  a  generality  made 
up  of  no  particulars;  that  is,  made  out  of  nothing?  The 
only  intelligent  conception  is,  that  every  event  is  special, 
one  as  truly  as  another;  for  nothing  comes  to  pass  in  God's 
world  without  some  particular  meaning  or  design.  And 
so  the  general  Providence  is  perfect,  because  the  special  is 
complete. 

And  yet  even  this  is  no  sufficient  conception  of  Provi- 
dence. There  is  yet,  after  all,  a  real  truth  associated  with 
the  specialty  view  just  stated,  and  covered,  in  part,  by  the 
scanty  garb  in  which  it  is  dressed;  viz.,  that  God  is  more 
warmly  reciprocal  with  us  and  the  struggles  of  our  faith,  in 
some  things  than  in  others — more  reciprocal,  that  is,  and 
closer  to  our  want,  and  warmer  to  our  feeling,  in  his  su- 
pernatural Providence,  than  he  is  in  his  natural. 

The  truth  will  be  set  in  a  more  definite  light,  if  we  con- 
ceive, first  of  all,  that  nature  is  a  kind  of  constant  quan- 
tity and  fixed  term  between  us  and  God.  It  needed  to  be 
so,  for  many  reasons.  We  could  not  even  keep  our  feet  if 
the  ground  had  no  stable  quality.  We  could  do  nothing 
in  the  way  of  industry,  attain  to  no  exercise  of  power; 
there  would  be  no  law,  no  science,  nothing  to  meet  our  in- 
telligence; we  could  not  act  responsibly  toward  each  other 
without  some  constant,  calculable,  or  known  medium 


408  PROVIDENCE    NATURAL 

between  us.  "We  could  apprehend  no  retributive  force  in 
nature,  waiting  by  the  laws  of  obligation,  to  be  their  sanc- 
tion. Even  God  himself  would  be  a  vague  and  desultory 
phantom,  if  he  were  not  represented  to  us  by  the  fixed 
laws  and  the  orderly,  enduring  processes  of  nature.  With- 
out these,  even  the  light  and  shade  of  his  supernatural 
manifestation  would  be  insignificant — -just  as  the  living 
play  of  a  countenance  would  signify  nothing,  if  it  had  no 
lines  of  repose  at  which  the  play  begins,  and  into  which  it 
returns. 

But,  while  such  is  nature,  it  is  yet,  as  we  have  seen,  sub- 
mitted, by  its  very  laws,  both  to  our  supernatural  action, 
and  to  that  of  God.  As  we  act  our  liberty  in  it  and  upon 
it,  never  suspending  or  defrauding,  even  for  a  moment, 
any  one  of  its  laws,  so  it  would  be  singular,  if  He  could 
not  do  the  same,  and  that  upon  a  scale  correspondent  with 
the  magnificence  of  his  attributes.  So,  in  millions  of 
ways,  at  every  minute,  the  courses  of  things  may  be 
touched  by  his  will,  and  turned  about,  as  the  holy  Poet 
says  of  the  cloud,  "to  do  whatsoever  he  commandeth 

«/  / 

upon  the  face  of  the  earth."  By  means  of  the  constant 
element  between  us  and  God — limbered,  though  constant, 
to  our  common  action — we  are  set  in  terms  of  reciprocity 
as  living  persons  or  powers,  and  are  found  acting,  as  to- 
ward each  other,  in  a  perpetual  dialogue  of  parts.  Taken 
thus,  in  the  whole  comprehension  of  its  import,  our  world 
is  nothing  but  a  vast,  special,  supernatural,  reciprocal 
Providence,  in  which  our  God  is  reigning  as  an  ever-pres- 
ent, ever-mindful  counselor  and  guide  and  friend,  a  Ke- 
deemer  of  our  sin,  a  hearer  of  our  prayers.  It  is  not  that 
he,  long  time  ago,  put  causes  at  work  to  meet  our  wants, 
and  answer  our  prayers,  but  that  he  worketh  hitherto. 


AND    SUPERNATURAL.  409 

He  is  no  dead  majesty,  but  a  living;  and,  if  we  want  a 
special  Providence,  he  is  special  enough  to  give  us  his  re- 
cognition. He  will  even  teach  us  how  to  pray,  correcting 
our  petitions  to  make  them  meet  his  counsel,  and  giving 
us  desires,  leveled  to  the  exact  aim  of  his  purposes;  even 
as  the  eagle  teaches  her  young  how  to  set  their  wings,  and 
rest  them  on  the  air  in  flight.  Not  that  he  means,  when 
speaking  of  things  "agreeable  to  his  will,"  that  we  are 
merely  to  come,  guessing  at  things  already  fixed,  and  try- 
ing to  suit  our  petition  to  the  motion  of  the  wheel  as  it 
rolls,  sliding  it  carefully  in,  at  the  right  place,  but  that  he 
will  have  us  pray  as  in  power ;  for  it  is  agreeable  to  his 
will  that  we  have  power  with  God,  and  prevail — power  to 
come  and  lay  our  hand  on  his,  as  his  is  laid  on  the  world's 
causes,  and,  by  the  suit  of  our  want,  emboldened  by  the 
acquaintanceship  of  our  faith,  to  move  that  hand.  And 
to  just  this  end,  as  Christ  himself  teaches,  all  things  in 
heaven  and  earth  are  submitted  pliantly  to  him,  so  that, 
without  shock  or  miracle,  he  can,  if  he  will,  turn  them  to 
his  friendly  and  gracious  purposes.  The  world  and  its 
affairs  are  so  to  become  coefficients  only  of  his  gospel. 

Such  is  the  conception  Christianity  holds  of  Providence, 
or  the  providential  government  of  the  world — it  is  super- 
natural, it  is  christly,  and  is  to  be  relied  upon  ever,  as  a 
power  operating  for  Christianity  in  the  earth.  Is  the  con- 
ception true,  is  it  borne  out  by  sufficient  proofs?  This,  I 
shall  now  undertake  to  show. 

Let  us  note,  in  passing,  however,  as  a  fact  introductory, 
that  just  such  a  government,  as  respects  the  mode,  would 
be  wanted  and  really  required,  apart  from  any  fall  of  sin ; 
or  work  of  deliverance  from  it.     For,  if  there  be  only  na 
ture,  with  her  constant  quantities  and  endlessly  propaga- 

35 


410  APART    FROM    SIN,     WE    WANT 

ted  causes,  if  there  be  no  divine  supernatural  agency  in 
the  world,  then  there  is  no  conceivable  footing  of  society, 
or  social  relationship  with  God  left  us.  Nature,  in  such  a 
scheme,  is  only  a  machine,  and  that  machine  is  all  that  we 
have  contact  with.  And  if  we  should  maintain  our  up- 
rightness, holding  on  in  ways  of  unfaltering  obedience, 
we  shall  none  the  less  want  to  know  God,  and  have  our 
society  with  him.  But  we  get  no  terms  of  society  in  a 
machine,  we  can  not  seek  unto  a  wall.  Acting  supernat- 
urally  ourselves,  we  need  also  to  be  supernaturally  met 
and  acted  on.  Without  this,  we  have  no  terms  of  reci- 
procity with  God  more  than  with  a  volcano,  or  a  tide  of 
the  sea.  Society  between  us  there  is  none.  Society  is  rig- 
idly definable,  as  being  a  supernatural  commerce  between 
parties  acting  supernaturally.  As  between  us  and  God,  it 
is  a  doing  and  receiving;  if  we  do  not  sin,  a  righteousness 
looking  up  to  God  in  confidence,  and  a  smile  of  approval 
looking  down  to  commend  and  bless.  But  if  there  be  no 
such  thing  as  a  divine  supernatural  agency,  then  is  no  such 
footing  of  society  conceivable.  We  exist  as  a  solitary 
party.  Nature  is  our  cage,  and  the  nearest  approach  we  get 
to  a  recognition,  is  to  find  that  we  are  shut  up  in  it.  Is  it  so  ? 
Do  any  of  us  think  it  is  so?  Did  we  really  believe  it,  what 
could  our  existence  be  but  a  conscious  defeat  and  mock- 
ery, a  longing  that  is  objectless,  a  breathing  without  air? 

But  our  state  is  not  a  state  of  sinless  obedience.  We 
have  set  the  retributive  causes  of  nature  against  us,  and 
Christianity  undertakes  to  be  our  deliverer.  And  the 
claim  now  is,  that  the  government  of  the  world  is  super- 
naturally administered,  so  as  to  work  with  it.  We  al- 
ledge,  then,  in  evidence — 

I.  That  facts  do  not  take  place  here,  in  human  society, 


A    GOVERNMENT    NOT    MECHANICAL.        411 

government,  and  the  church,  as  they  should,  if  events 
were  left  to  the  mere  causalities  of  nature,  and  were  no 
way  controllable  by  a  supernatural  ministration  of  divine 
government,  or  by  some  genuinely  Christian  providence, 
in  the  management  of  human  affairs. 

The  fact  of  sin  is  palpable,  and  is  shown  by  evidences 
not  to  be  questioned.  What  shock  of  disorder  it  must 
have  given,  or  has  in  fact  given,  to  the  mundane  kosmos, 
in  all  its  parts,  we  have  also  shown.  Taking  now  the 
supposition  that  there  is  nothing  else  but  nature,  and 
nature  a  scheme  of  universal  cause  and  effect,  that  is,  a 
machine,  propagating  its  activities  by  its  own  organic 
laws,  we  ought  to  see  no  improvement,  no  advance,  but  a 
regular  running  down  rather  from  bad  to  worse,  and  a 
final  disappearance  of  all  vestiges  of  order.  Society  and 
human  capacity  ought  to  sink  away,  universally,  toward 
barbarism,  and  nature  itself  to  grow  weaker,  more  sterile, 
deeper  in  deformity  and  confusion.  So  it  ought  to  be — 
speculatively  viewed,  or  according  to  conditions  of  scien- 
tific order  and  law,  nothing  else  could  be.  And  yet  we 
are  just  now  taken  with  such  confidence  of  progress  in 
our  human  history,  as  to  imagine  that  progress  is  even  a 
prime  law  of  natural  development  itself.  In  which  we 
are  doubtless  right  as  regards  the  general  fact  of  progress, 
(it  is  no  fact  as  regards  the  savage  races,)  but  are  only  the 
more  strangely  blind  to  the  higher  fact,  which  that  prog- 
ress indicates ;  viz.,  the  regenerative  action  of  supernatu- 
ral forces,  that,  in  spite  of  the  downward  tendency  of 
mere  nature  under  sin,  are  creating  always  a  new  heavens 
and  earth,  out  of  the  ruins  of  the  former  beauty,  and. 
making  even  the  losing  experiences  of  evil,  conditions  of 
spiritual  and  social  progress.  Plainly  no  such  progress 


412  THINGS    DO    NOT    TAKE    PLACE 

ever  ought  to  be,  or  ever  would  be  made,  apart  from  the 
supernatural  causes  which  are  its  spring. 

But  there  is  a  more  deliberate  way  of  testing  this  point, 
and  a  method  of  inquest  that  reaches  farther.  We  turn 
ourselves  to  the  courses  and  the  grand  events  of  human 
history,  all  that  we  include  in  the  providential  history  of 
the  world — the  wars,  diplomacies,  emigrations,  revolutions, 
persecutions,  discoveries,  and  scientific  developments  of 
the  world — and  we  are  immediately  met  by  the  appearance 
of  some  wonderful  consent  or  understanding,  between 
Christianity  and  the  providential  courses  of  things. 
Christianity  is,  in  form,  the  supernatural  kingdom  and 
working  of  God  in  the  earth.  It  begins  with  a  supernat- 
ural advent  of  divinity,  and  closes  with  a  supernatural 
exit  of  divinity;  and  the  divine  visitant,  thus  entered 
into  the  world  and  going  out  from  it,  is  himself  a  divine 
miracle  in  his  own  person ;  his  works  are  miracles,  and 
his  doctrine  quite  as  truly,  and  the  whole  transaction, 
taken  as  a  movement  on  the  world,  or  in  it,  that  is  not  of 
it,  supposes  in  fact  a  new  and  superior  kind  of  adminis- 
tration, instituted  by  God  Himself.  Accordingly,  if  it  be 
true  that  God  is  in  such  a  work,  having  all  the  highest 
and  last  ends  of  existence  rested  in  it,  he  ought  to  govern 
the  world,  as  we  have  already  said,  for  it,  and  so  as  to 
forward  this  as  the  main  interest  included  in  it. 

Now  whatever  may  be  true,  as  respects  the  positive  and 
direct  evidence  of  such  a  fact,  this,  at  least,  is  a  matter 
that  will  strike  any  one  as  being  truly  remarkable,  and, 
moreover,  as  being  quite  unaccountable,  except  on  the 
ground  of  its  truth,  that  Christianity  has  never  been  ex- 
terminated, but  still  lives,  and  even  holds  a  reigning 
power  at  the  head  of  all  learning,  art,  commerce,  society. 


AS  THEY  OUGHT  UNDER  MERE  NATURE.  413 

polity,  and  political  dominion  in  the  earth.  Pythagoras, 
Socrates,  Plato,  Zeno,  Aristotle,  Seneca,  all  these  great 
founders  and  law-givers  in  the  world  of  philosophy  are 
gone ;  the  Academy  and  the  Porch  and  all  the  schools 
that  were  gathered  by  the  wisdom  and  the  mighty  and 
beautiful  thought  of  these  first  minds  of  the  world,  are 
scattered ;  but  Jesus,  the  unlettered  rustic,  lives,  and  his 
simple  words,  distinguished  by  no  literary  pretensions, 
and  recorded  only  in  the  simplest  and  most  fragmentary 
way,  by  the  unlettered  men  that  caught  them,  live  also. 
Studied  in  deepest  reverence,  and  expounded  by  all  the 
richest,  nicest  learning  of  the  world,  and  fed  on  by  the 
praying  souls  of  the  faithful  in  all  walks  and  conditions 
of  life,  they  are  continually  gathering  new  followers,  and 
composing  a  larger  school,  to  which  no  inclosures  of 
Academy  or  Porch,  nothing  but  kingdoms  and  conti- 
nents, can  think  to  give  their  name.  Why  now  is  it, 
that  time  and  the  world's  government  conspire  so  power- 
fully with  Jesus,  and  not  with  such  a  great  and  deeply 
cultured  soul  as  Plato?  Why  with  Christianity,  and  not 
with  any  proudest  school  of  human  opinion?  All  the 
mere  human  teachers  are  much  closer  to  nature  certainly 
than  Jesus  was,  and  if  the  world's  government  is  wholly 
natural,  or  in  the  interest  of  nature,  it  would  seem  to  be 
a  very  plain  inference  that  what  belongs  to  nature  will  be 
most  easily  perpetuated.  Why  should  a  government,  in 
the  interest  of  nature,  concur  to  enthrone  and  crown  what 
is  really  supernatural  ? 

Besides,  nature,  as  we  have  seen,  is  a  power  acting 
retributively,  in  a  process  of  self-chastisement  and  deteri- 
oration naturally  endless,  and  upon  this  falling  flood,  or 
into  it,  Christianity  settles,  to  grapple  with  its  mad  causa 

35* 


414  THINGS    DO    NOT    TAKE    PLACE 

tions,  and  roll  them  back,  and  hush  their  elemental  war, 
by  its  words  of  peace ;  how  then  is  it,  that  a  new,  super- 
natural dispensation,  which  arrays  itself,  at  all  points, 
against  nature  and  its  penal  disorders,  erects  upon  the 
unsteady  waters  of  so  fickle  and  wild  a  sea,  the  only 
institution  that  for  the  last  eighteen  hundred  years  has 
been  able  to  challenge  the  honors  of  permanence  ?  If 
there  be  no  power  but  nature,  no  government  superior  to 
the  interest  of  nature,  it  certainly  ought  not  to  be  so.  On 
the  contrary,  whatever  pretends  to  be  supernatural,  ought 
to  die  soonest,  and  show  the  greatest  frailty — even  as  the 
pouring  waters  of  Niagara  may  well  enough  keep  on  over 
the  rapids,  down  the  fatal  leap,  and  no  cessation  make, 
even  for  millions  of  years ;  whereas,  the  slender,  light- 
trimmed  vessel,  that  sets  her  sails  for  the  ascent  of  those 
same  rapids,  ought  not  to  stem  them  by  one  inch,  and 
least  of  all,  to  become  an  institution  in  them,  stiffly  and 
steadily  breasting  the  current  for  ages.  And  yet,  if 
there  were  some  Higher  Providence  governing  those  falls 
in  the  interest  of  the  vessel,  and  not,  as  nature  would,  the 
vessel  in  the  interest  of  the  falls,  then  plainly  it  would  no 
longer  be  absurd,  for  that  same  frail  craft  to  become  an 
institution,  even  half  way  down  the  final  leap  -itself. 

If  it  be  suggested  that  other  religions,  such,  for  exam- 
ple, as  Buddhism  and  Mohammedanism,  are  also  super- 
natural in  their  form,  and  have  survived,  one  of  them  a 
third  longer,  and  the  other  two-thirds  as  long,  as  Chris- 
tianity, it  is  enough  to  reply,  as  regards  the  latter,  that 
all  the  forces  of  reality  it  had  were  stolen  from  Christian- 
ity, and  that,  in  spite  of  these,  it  is  now  just  upon  the 
death ;  and,  as  regards  the  former,  that  while  its  machine- 
ries are  in  form  supernatural,  it  really  undertakes  to  do 


AS  THEY  OUGHT  UNDER  MERE  NATURE.  415 

nothing,  as  against  the  lapse  and  disability  of  nature,  but 
rather  settles  into  the  same  disorder  with  it,  and  takes  a 
show  of  perpetuity,  because  it  flows  with  the  current,  and 
wins  a  kind  of  permanence  which  is  only  another  name 
for  the  disability  it  creates.  This  is  true  of  all  the  false 
religions ;  they  belong  to  nature,  and  become  constituent 
elements  in  that  hell  of  disability  which  nature  makes  out 
of  sin.  Christianity  rises,  and  raises  its  adherent  races 
with  it.  These  others  fall,  and  finally  die,  when  their  ad- 
herent races  die  out  of  the  world,  assisting  and  hastening 
that  event,  each  in  its  own  way.  When,  therefore,  we  con- 
sider that  Christianity  goes  directly  into  a  conflict  with 
nature,  calling  nature  death,  and  engaging  to  combat  the 
death  by  its  regenerative  power,  and  that  still,  after  so 
many  centuries,  it  holds  on  victorious,  what  shall  we 
infer,  with  greater  certainty,  than  that  the  government  of 
the  world  is  with  it,  in-  its  interest,  engaged  to  give  it  suc- 
cess ?  Without  or  apart  from  this  fact,  it  plainly  could 
not  have  held  its  ground,  even  for  a  single  year.  No! 
Christianity  stands,  and  will,  because  the  God  of  Chris- 
tianity is  the  God  of  the  world.  The  kingdom  is  not 
moved,  and  can  not  be,  as  it  certainly  should  under  a 
mere  providence  of  natural  causes,  and  that  for  the  mani- 
fest reason,  that  all  power  in  heaven  and  in  earth  is  given 
into  the  hands  of  the  king.  And  this  brings  us  to  a — 

II.  Argument  which  is  more  general  and  more  positive, 
viz.  this ;  that,  if  we  could  make  a  perfectly  intelligent 
survey  of  the  great  world's  history  itself,  and  see  how  its 
principal  events  are  turned,  we  should  only  discover  the 
same  thing  on  a  larger  scale;  that  the  world  itself  is  gov- 
erned in  the  interest  of  Christianity,  or  the  supernatural 
grace  and  kingdom  of  Jesus  Christ.  We  plainly  can  not 


416  PREPARATION    OF 

undertake  any  such  review,  for  the  reason  that  no  human 
insight  is  equal  to  the  task ;  but  if  we  just  glance  along  the 
inventory,  so  to  speak,  of  the  matters  of  this  history,  re- 
calling chapters  by  their  titles,  and  only  having  in  mind 
the  relation  of  so  many  things  to  the  central  figure,  Christ 
and  his  kingdom,  we  shall  find  that,  in  his  glorious  per- 
son, we  get  the  key  by  which  their  mystery  and  meaning 
are  solved,  their  practical  harmony  expounded. 

Thus  we  have  the  Jewish  dispersion,  before  Christ,  in 
all  the  principal  cities  of  the  world,  and  the  establishment 
there  of  the  synagogue  worship ;  so  that,  when  the  apos- 
tles go  abroad  with  their  message,  they  have  places  in 
which  to  speak  made  ready,  assemblies  gathered,  and  what 
is  more  than  all,  minds  prepared  by  Jewish  symbols  and 
associations,  to  receive  the  meaning  of  the  new  gospel,  as 
related  to  a  first  dispensation  of  law ;  without  which,  as 
we  have  seen,  its  true  place  in  God's  economy  is  undis- 
covered; without  which  too,  it  is  bolted  into  the  world, 
separately  from  all  historic  connections,  and  from  all  the 
evidences  to  be  shown  for  it,  by  its  fulfillment  of  ideas  hid 
in  ancient  rites  and  forms. 

Next  we  observe  that  philosophy  had  just  now  culmi- 
nated among  the  Greeks  and  Eomans,  and  was  giving  way 
as  a  force  that  is  spent.  The  Sophists  had  run  it  into  the 
ground.  Faith  in  it  was  gone,  and  with  that,  all  faith  too 
in  the  gods  of  their  religion.  In  this  manner  a  deep  and 
painful  hunger  was  prepared,  and  multitudes  of  the  most 
thoughtful  minds  were  actually  groping  after  the  very 
food  which  Christ  was  to  bring. 

A.t  this  time  too  the  Greek  tongue,  which,  for  ages  to 
come,  was  to  be  the  general  vehicle  of  thought  and  com- 
merce between  the  peoples  of  the  world,  had  become,  to  a 


THE    WORLD    FOB    CHRIST.  417 

great  extent,  the  vernacular  of  the  country,  and  a  Gentile 
speech  or  medium  was  thus  made  ready,  to  receive  and 
convey  the  grace  that  is  given  to  the  Gentiles. 

The  Eomans  too  are  now  masters  of  the  country,  and 
the  Roman  Empire,  of  which  it  is  become  an  integral  part, 
is  well  nigh  universal.  When  Christ  therefore  is  crucified, 
it  is,  as  it  should  be,  the  public  act  of  the  world,  decreed 
by  the  Roman  procurator  in  the  name  of  the  world. 
There  is  also  now  a  more  open  state  of  society  between  the 
nations  and  races  of  mankind  than  was  ever  known  before ; 
because  they  are  all,  in  fact,  one  empire.  The  apostles 
therefore  may  well  enough  go  into  all  the  world,  as  they 
are  bidden,  because  the  pass  of  a  Roman  citizen  is  good  in 
all  the  world. 

It  has  also  been  noted  as  a  remarkable  fact,  that  when 
the  Incarnate  Word  appears,  it  is  a  time  of  general  peace ; 
and  it  is  remarkable,  not  only  as  a  matter  of  poetic  fitness, 
or  esthetic  propriety,  but  still  more,  in  the  deeper  and  more 
cogent  sense  of  a  practical  necessity;  for  if  Christ  had 
come,  in  the  tumult  of  a  time  of  war,  his  glorious,  but 
gentle,  appeal  of  truth  and  love  would  have  been  utterly 
drowned  and  lost.  In  the  din  of  so  great  noise  and  pas- 
sion, who  could  feel  his  want  of  a  salvation?  who  be  at- 
tracted by  the  beauty  of  a  character?  who  descend  to  a 
cross  to  look  for  the  Incarnate  Word,  and  catch  his  mourn- 
ful testimony  ? 

Take  now  these  familiar  facts,  and  what  are  they  all  but 
a  visible  preparation  of  human  history  for  Christ,  showing 
on  how  vast  a  scale  the  world  is  managed  in  the  interest 
of  Christ  and  his  supernatural  advent?  Why  else,  too,  do 
they  all  concur  in  time,  when  they  might  as  well  have 
happened  centuries  apart?  Whence  comes  it  that,  when 


418  THE    SUBSEQUENT    HISTORY 

human  history  has  been  brewing  in  so  great  a  ferment,  for 
so  many  ages,  all  these  great  preparations  should  just  now 
be  ready,  calling  for  the  king  with  their  common  voice  and 
saying — "the  fullness  of  time  is  come"? 

As  it  was  with  the  events  that  preceded  and  prepared 
the  gospel,  so  it  has  been  with  those  which  followed  its 
publication.  They  give  us  their  true  sense  and  guage  of 
power,  in  the  fact  that  they  inaugurate  a  new  era,  called 
the  Christian  era.  And  what  are  we  to  see  in  the  simple 
Anno  Domini  of  our  dates  and  superscriptions,  but  that, 
for  some  reason,  the  great  world-history  has  been  bending 
itself  to  the  lowly  person  of  Jesus,  from  the  hour  of  his 
miraculous  advent  onward  through  so  many  centuries  of 
time.  The  Christian  era!  a  new  formation,  speaking  geo- 
logically, in  the  domain  of  human  life  and  society! 
Christ,  who  is  called  by  many  the  impossible,  the  incredi- 
ble person,  the  gospeled  carpenter  raised  into  a  mythic 
divinity — to  him  it  is  that  the  great  world  has  so  long 
bent  itself,  and  dated  its  history  from  his  year !  So  clearly 
is  it  signified,  that  the  government  of  the  world  is  waiting 
on  Christianity,  and  working  in  its  interest,  and  is  thus,  in 
highest  virtuality,  a  supernatural  kingdom. 

The  events  themselves  of  the  new  era  indicate  the  same 
thing.  First,  we  hear  Porphyry  and  other  assailants  of 
the  gospel  complaining,  strangely,  that  their  gods  are  grown 
dumb,  refusing  any  more  to  heal,  or  give  oracles.  The 
Jewish  unbelievers  are  smitten  next  with  a  token  of  dis- 
couragement even  more  appalling,  in  the  terrible  siege  and 
dreadful  overthrow  of  their  Holy  city;  in  which  they  are 
shown,  as  convincingly  as  possible,  that  God  has  brought 
their  ancient  specialty  of  theocratic  rule  and  distinction 
to  a  full  end — just  that  which  even  prophecy  had  foretold 


IS    MANAGEB     FOR    CHRIST. 

as  the  inaugural  of  a  universal  religion.  After  long  and 
bitter  persecutions,  Constantine  is  finally  enrolled  as  a 
convert,  and  Christianity  takes  the  ascendant  above  all  the 
gods  of  the  empire.  The  northern  hordes  begin  to  pour 
down  the  Alps,  overrunning  the  distracted  and  worn-out 
civilizations  of  the  empire,  and  conquering,  in  fact,  a  relig- 
ion, by  which  they  are  themselves  to  be  tamed  and  so- 
cially regenerated.  The  false  prophet  appears,  propagating 
his  new  dispensation  by  the  fierce  apostleship  of  arms,  and 
the  world  is  to  be  shown  what  is  the  value  of  a  triune 
grace  and  gospel,  by  a  grand  collateral  experiment,  in 
which  both  trinity  and  grace  are  wanting.  The  crusaders 
follow  in  successive  repetitions  of  defeat  and  disaster;  as 
if  God's  purpose  were  to  stamp  it  on  the  Christian  sense 
of  the  nations,  that  Christianity  is  forbidden  by  the  eter- 
nal proprieties  of  its  mission,  to  strengthen  itself  by  any 
victories  but  those  of  peace.  The  discovery  of  the  mar- 
iner's compass  leads  off  the  discoveries  of  Yasco  de  Gama 
and  Columbus.  Printing  is  invented,  and  the  age  of  learn- 
ing revived.  This  prepares  the  great  Reformation  of  relig- 
ion ;  for  it,  Luther ;  and  for  Luther,  God  so  musters  forces, 
as  to  give  him  always  civil  protection,  keeping  him  in  for- 
tress, and  compelling  even  the  combined  fury  of  kings  and 
kingdoms  to  pass  by  harmless.  The  Puritans  are  driven 
out  of  England,  to  plant  their  gospel  of  liberty  and  light 
on  the  shores  of  a  new  world.  Cromwell  breaks  down 
the  monarchy,  to  inaugurate,  in  England,  religious  tolera- 
tion ;  so  to  regenerate  the  laws  and  political  liberties  of  the 
English  nation.  The  American  Eevolution,  followed  by 
the  federal  constitution,  fulfills  the  Christian  aim  of  Puri- 
tanism, and  lays  all  claims  and  titles  of  legitimacy  at  the 
feet  of  human  liberty  and  progress.  The  wars  of  NapoleoD 


420  THE    SUBSEQUENT    HISTORY 

follow,  by  which  the  oppressive  dynasties  of  Europe  are 
broken  up  or  shattered,  to  let  in  the  light  of  a  new  age  of 
improvement.  The  revelations  of  Christian  science,  mean- 
time, are  uncovering  and  transforming  the  world,  tenfold- 
ing  its  forces  and  uses,  and  all  that  constitutes  its  value,  in 
a  single  generation.  The  grand  commercial  apostleship  of 
steam  and  telegraph,  hurrying  the  intercourse  and  short- 
ening the  distances  of  the  ends  of  the  world,  fixes  the  su- 
periority of  the  Christian  nations,  and  prepares  the  speedy 
sovereignty  of  the  Christian  ideas. 

What  now  do  we  distinguish  in  these  facts,  but  an  out- 
standing, world- wide  proof  of  the  truth  we  just  now  stated, 
that  the  government  of  the  world  is  in  the  interest  of 
Christianity,  and  so  far  is  itself  a  really  continuous  su- 
pernatural administration?  These  events  are  a  kind  of 
providential  procession  that  we  see,  marching  on  to 
accomplish  the  one  given  result,  the  universal  and  final 
ascendancy  of  Jesus  Christ.  They  march,  too,  in  the 
beat  of  time,  preserving  their  right  order,  and  appearing, 
each,  just  when  it  is  wanted,  not  before  or  after.  When 
has  it  ever  been  seen  that  the  government  of  the  world  was 
conspiring,  in  this  large  historic  way,  across  the  distance 
of  remote  ages,  with  any  merely  natural  man,  his  teach- 
ings, or  plans,  or  work?  Whatever  else  may  be  true,  this 
at  least  is  plain,  that  between  Christianity  as  a  fabric  all- 
supernatural,  concerned  for  nothing  but  to  do  a  supernat- 
ural work,  and  the  world  as  mere  nature,  suffering  noth- 
ing above  nature  to  be,  there  ought  to  be,  and  indeed 
never  could  be  any  such  concurrence.  Besides,  the  progress 
indicated  by  these  facts,  is  plainly  impossible  on  the  foot- 
ing of  mere  nature;  for  nature,  under  sin,  becomes,  we 
have  seen,  a  grand  destructive  causality  rather,  such  as, 


IS    MANAGED    FOB    CHRIST.  421 

running  by  its  own  mechanical  laws,  can  of  couise  breed 
no  result  of  self-restoration,  but  must  run  itself  down- 
ward, instead,  into  a  worse  and  more  fatal  deterioration. 

But  it  will  be  imagined  by  some,  that  these  are  facts 
which  we  obtain  by  gleaning;  that,  meantime,  there  is  an 
abundance  equally  copious  of  adverse  facts,  such  as  have 
no  concurrence  with  the  gospel  of  Christ,  but  seem,  in- 
stead, to  offer  only  hindrance.  What  account,  for  exam- 
ple, can  we  make,  of  the  dark  ages  so  called,  and  of  the 
confessedly  base  corruptions  that  have  been  allowed  to 
overrun  Christianity,  as  a  doctrine  of  faith  and  salvation  ? 

To  this  I  answer,  that,  by  this  question,  rightly  viewed, 
is  opened  one  of  the  most  fruitful  and  convincing  chapters 
of  Christian  evidence;  showing,  as  no  other  does,  that 
Christianity  is  upheld  by  nothing  but  the  fact,  that  the 
government  of  the  world  is  with  it.  What  could  follow, 
but  a  corruption  of  Christianity,  at  the  beginning,  from 
our  very  belief  in  it  ?  for  by  our  faith  we  bring  ourselves 
to  it,  as  a  contribution ;  contributing,  of  course,  our 
misbegotten  opinions,  our  confused  passions,  our  habits 
prejudices,  weaknesses  of  every  kind,  and  so  infusing 
our  poison,  more  or  less  hurtfully,  into  that  which  saves 
us ;  even  as  the  patient  will  communicate  his  plague  to 
his  physician,  or  the  bad  wine  give  its  smell  to  the  jar 
into  which  it  is  poured.  The  disciple  will  as  certainly 
give  his  form  to  Christianity,  when  he  preaches  it,  or 
commends  it,  as  he  will  receive  a  regenerated  life  from  it. 
The  new  gospel,  accordingly — it  could  not  be  otherwise — 
will  go  into  a  grand  process  of  corruption,  at  first,  such 
as  will  perchance  be  called  improvement,  and  the  prob- 
lem of  history  will  be,  to  settle  and  discriminate  the  truth, 
by  winnowing  out  the  forms  of  human  error  and  corrup- 

36 


422  THE    DAEK    AGES 

tion  from  it.  Without  some  process  of  this  kind,  it  could 
never  be  seen  what  really  belongs  to  the  gospel,  and  what 
to  the  unwisdom  and  unbelief  of  those  in  whom  it  dwells. 
As  the  gospel  was  revealed  to  sin,  so  there  was  a  different 
kind  of  necessity  that  the  gospel  should  be  revealed  ex- 
perimentally through  sin.  Man,  the  believer,  must,  in 
other  words,  be  allowed  to  try  his  hand  upon  it,  and  make 
it  his  gospel — make  it  wiser  by  his  philosophy,  stronger 
by  his  regal  patronage,  more  conspicuous  and  stately  by 
the  paraphernalia  of  forms  and  the  robed  officials  he  may 
dress  up  for  its  due  embodiment. 

This  is  that  mystery  of  iniquity  that  an  apostle  saw, 
even  in  his  time,  beginning  to  work ;  which  he  said  must 
work,  till  it  should  be  taken  out  of  the  way.  This  is 
that  falling  away  first,  that  must  come,  the  man  of  sin 
that  must  be  revealed.  It  is  not  the  papacy  exactly,  but 
that  which  made  the  papacy ;  viz.,  faith,  not  able,  without 
a  severe  schooling,  to  mind  the  distinction  between  a  sub- 
jection to  and  a  supervision  of  the  gospel ;  for,  in  becoming 
responsible  for  it  as  a  servant,  what  will  the  new  believer 
more  certainly  do  than  take  it  in  charge,  patronize  it, 
mend  it,  that  is,  disfigure  and  hide  it  ?  And  there  will 
be  no  limit  to  this  wrong.  Unable  to  stay  content  with 
the  humble  guise  and  the  simple  doctrine  of  the  cross,  he 
will  exalt  himself  unwittingly  above  what  is  called  God 
in  the  work,  and  will  go  on  to  be  so  grand  a  supervisor, 
that  finally,  as  his  sins  are  added  to  the  forwardness  of  his 
service,  we  shall  begin  to  see  that  he  has  contributed  his 
whole  self,  and  even  taken  God's  seat,  in  his  preposterous 
ambition ;  becoming  first  the  minister,  then  the  vicar,  and 
last  of  all,  to  give  a  true  name,  the  usurper  of  God's  authority. 
Christianity  is  now  in  his  charge,  and  is  not  improved  by 


ACCOUNTED    FOR.  423 

Jiis  additions.  Disappointment  follows;  this  compels  a 
reconsideration,  this  a  reformation,  and  so  the  true  gospel 
is  finally  restored,  with  its  reasons  only  certified,  by 
the  human  abuse  through  which  it  has  passed,  and  the 
lines  of  contrast  drawn  by  so  many  miserable  corruptions. 
Thus,  at  a  very  early  period,  we  hear  such  men  as 
Justin  and  Clement  of  Alexandria,  proposing  to  give  the 
Christian  doctrine  the  dress  of  a  philosophy,  and  find 
them  earnestly  at  work  to  accomplish  a  point  of  so  great 
consequence,  imagining  that  so  it  will  be  more  able  to 
command  the  respect  of  the  learned,  and  will  better  sat- 
isfy the  want  of  the  world.  The  work  goes  on,  till,  at 
last,  some  centuries  of  dialectic  industry  may  be  said  to 
have  completely  finished  all  that  could  be  done,  when  lo ! 
the  beautiful,  life-giving  truths  of  Christ,  offered  by  him 
to  faith,  are  converted  into  a  dry,  scholastic  jingle,  ad- 
dressed to  speculative  reason,  without  value  even  to  that, 
and  as  easily  rejected  as  embraced.  Monasticism  and 
vows  of  celibacy  are  added  in  the  same  way,  to  give 
Christianity,  in  certain  special  examples,  the  advantage  of 
a  more  superlative  virtue  than  God  had  planned  for,  in 
the  practical  relations  of  life ;  finally  to  result  in  corrup- 
tions too  monstrous  ever  to  have  been  gendered  in  those 
relations.  Constantine,  having  become  a  disciple,  must 
needs  contribute  not  his  person  only,  but  all  the  power  of 
his  throne,  to  the  gospel,  expecting  in  that  manner  to 
make  it  partake  of  his  imperial  pre-eminence,  and  become 
strong  by  a  strength  thus  contributed.  Uniting  it,  in  this 
manner,  to  the  state,  he  not  only  stays  the  woes  of  perse- 
cution, but  he  lifts  the  church  into  a  rank  of  political  as- 
cendancy ;  which  is  the  same  as  to  say  that  he  dooms  it, 
for  ages  to  come,  to  be  the  mother  of  all  unholy  arts  and 


424  THE    DARK    AGES 

oppressions,  and  the  source  of  unspeakable  public  miseries. 
Gregory  the  Great  can  find  no  rest  to  his  prayers,  till  the 
church  is  consolidated  under  the  acknowledged  primacy 
of  St.  Peter ;  and  when  it  is  done,  he  may  fitly  rest  in  his 
prayers,  having  made  the  church  such  an  organ  of  abuses, 
oppressions,  and  religious  woes,  as  the  world  had  never 
seen  before,  and  never  will  see  again.  Images  and  pic- 
tures are  at  length  set  up  in  the  holy  places,  under  the 
fair  pretense  that  they  are  needed  to  represent  the  spirit- 
ual truths  of  religion  to  the  eye,  and  so  to  accommodate 
the  apprehension  of  weak  and  ignorant  minds.  And 
then,  finally,  behold !  as  the  fruit  of  so  great  an  improve- 
ment, whole  nations  of  people  worshiping  the  images, 
and  before  them,  transformed  into  nations  of  idolaters ! 

So  the  mystery  works,  and  so  the  true  gospel  is  becom- 
ing distinguished  from  the  false,  the  gospel  of  the  Son  of 
G-od  from  man's  gospel  of  additions,  improvements,  and 
airy  conceits.  As  Christ  revealed  his  gospel  by  commu- 
nication, so  here  it  is  revealed  again,  as  it  needs  must  be, 
by  the  light  and  shade  of  historical  experiment ;  settled, 
or  adjusted,  or  practically  defined,  by  use  and  abuse. 
These  facts  appear  to  be  entirely  adverse  to  Christianity. 
They  are  so,  and,  in  that,  have  their  value.  That  the 
government  of  the  world,  therefore,  has  passed  by  on  the 
other  side,  and  let  Christianity  fall  in  these  facts,  we  are 
not  to  suppose.  Being  a  gift  to  human  liberty,  it  could 
not  otherwise  be  established.  When  the  experiment  is 
finished,  then  the  Divine  Word  will  burst  up  into  a  second 
coming,  through  the  human  incrustations,  consuming  by 
his  breath  and  destroying  by  his  brightness,  the  accumu- 
lated wisdoms  and  pomps  of  his  mistaken  followers.  In 
all  these  losing  agencies,  there  is  yet  no  loss.  The  dark 


ACCOUNTED    FOB.  425 

ages  we  speak  of  are  yet  in  no  backward  motion.  Still 
the  march  of  Christian  history  is  onward.  If  these  bad 
impediments  were  not  already  raised,  why,  then  they 
were  yet  to  be  raised.  Just  so  far  on  its  way  to  the  state 
of  universal  dominion,  is  the  gospel  and  supernatural 
kingdom  of  Jesus  Christ. 

Still  there  have  been  events,  it  must  be  admitted,  in 
what  is  called  Christian  history,  which  are  darker  and 
more  difficult  of  solution.  They  appear,  at  first  view,  to 
have  no  place  under  a  scheme  of  providential  govern- 
ment, such  as  we  are  now  supposing.  And  yet,  if  we 
could  hold  a  longer  reach  of  times,  and  seize  the  connec- 
tions of  history  with  a  broader  grasp  of  intelligence,  they 
might  fall  into  place  and  become  as  transparent,  under 
such  a  scheme,  as  any  other.  As  it  is,  we  can  only  sug- 
gest possibilities,  and  start  guesses,  and  rest  till  our  facul- 
ties grow  to  the  dimensions  of  the  subjects.  What  does 
it  mean,  for  example,  that  the  Jesuits  and  the  Council  of 
Trent  were  able  to  stop,  or  set  a  limit  to,  the  Reformation 
of  the  church?  We  can  not  answer,  and  probably  shall 
never  know.  Like  all  evil,  it  may  be  referrible  to  the 
necessary  scope  of  human  liberty.  Or  it  may  be  that  the 
Reformation  itself  was  a  thing  too  incomplete  and  partial 
to  be  allowed  a  sweep  of  universal  triumph.  It  might 
have  been  a  great  disaster  to  the  religion  of  Christ,  to  be 
resolved  into  a  mere  Reformationism,  and  left  confronted 
bv  no  antagonistic  force.  Why,  again,  was  it,  or  how, 
that  the  churches  of  Northern  Africa  were  allowed  to  be 
overrun  by  barbarians,  and  finally,  in  the  loss  of  their 
faith,  to  give  way  utterly,  and  fall  into  extinction,  before 
a  barbarous  religion?  Was  it  that  occasional  examples 
of  loss  and  retrocession  must  be  suffered,  in  order  to  the 

86* 


426  ADVERSE   FACTS 

enforcement  of  a  just  responsibility  for  the  gospel  in  its 
adherents  and  followers,  otherwise  ready  to  assume  that, 
having  (rod  for  its  author,  it  will  take  care  of  itself? 
This  we  can  not  answer,  but  we  can  without  difficulty 
imagine  it  to  be  so.  Why,  again,  were  the  French  Hu- 
guenots, the  religious  hope  and  glory  of  their  time,  suf- 
fered to  be  butchered  or  expelled  the  kingdom  ?  Was  it 
that  so  many  great  and  noble  men  might  endanger  again 
the  simplicity  of  the  truth,  and  could  only  give  their  most 
valuable  testimony  for  Christ  by  their  death  or  exile  ?  Or 
was  it  that  Calvinism  itself,  preparing,  at  this  time,  to  es- 
tablish a  new  type  of  individualism  under  its  doctrine  of 
an  electing  and  special  grace,  and  so  to  inaugurate  a  new 
state  of  ecclesiastical  and  civil  liberty,  might  have  stiff- 
ened, having  God's  decrees  all  with  it,  into  a  form  of 
Christian  absolutism  too  closely  resembled  to  the  faith  of 
Mohammed,  and  must  needs  be  tempered  therefore,  in 
this  manner,  by  the  experience  of  a  predestinating  coun- 
sel opposite,  shaking  even  it  to  its  fall  ?  Or,  if  we  ask 
why  it  is  that  so  great  decay  of  faith  is  suffered  in  Ger- 
many and  in  the  Christian  world  generally,  at  the  present 
time  ?  why  it  is  that  learning  is  turned  against  the  gospel, 
to  explain  it  away,  or  reduce  it  to  the  terms  of  nature  and 
speculative  reason  ?  the  question  may  be  dark  to  many, 
and  may  seem  to  admit  no  satisfactory  answer.  Still,  to 
any  one  who  has  thought  deeply,  it  will  be  something  to 
ask  whether  it  was  possible  for  the  principle  of  faith  ever 
to  be  set  in  its  true  post  of  honor,  till  the  relations  of  na- 
ture and  the  supernatural  are  settled  by  a  thorough  dis- 
cussion, such  as  brings  every  truth  of  Christianity  into 
question  ? 
On  the  whole,  we  discover  nothing  in  any  of  these  dark- 


PROBABLY    CONSISTENT.  427 

est  and  most  adverse  facts  of  history,  to  shake  our  convic- 
tion that  the  world  is  governed,  as  we  said  at  the  begin- 
ning, in  the  interest  of  the  incarnation  or  supernatural 
advent  of  Jesus  Christ.  Almost  all  the  great  staple 
events  of  history  reveal  this  fact,  in  forms  of  palpable 
evidence,  and  if  in  some  it  seems  to  be  less  plain,  there 
yet  is  nothing  in  them  to  dislodge  our  faith,  even  for  a 
moment.  Besides,  we  have  always  before  us  the  one  ma- 
jestic fact,  that  Christianity  still  lives.  The  church,  being 
a  supernatural  institution,  all  history  bends  to  it,  and  it 
proves  its  sublime  peculiarity  in  the  fact,  that  it  is  forever 
indestructible  by  time  and  its  changes.  The  schools  of 
Pythagoras,  and  all  the  great  teachers  after  him,  have 
flourished  for  a  day,  and  vanished — tokens,  all,  of  the 
necessary  frailty  of  mere'  natural  wisdom — but  the  church 
of  Jesus  Christ,  the  Nazarene  teacher,  stands  from  age  to 
age.  It  began  with  a  feeble  knot  of  disciples,  it  has 
spread  itself  over  a  vast  field  or  kingdom,  including  in 
its  ample  scope  all  the  foremost  nations  and  peoples  of  the 
world.  Persecution  has  not  crushed  it,  power  has  not 
beaten  it  back,  time  has  not  abated  its  force,  and,  what  is 
most  wonderful  of  all,  the  abuses  and  treasons  of  its  own 
friends  have  never  shaken  its  stability.  Mohammedan- 
ism, punctually  served  and  to  the  letter,  by  the  bigoted 
fidelity  of  its  adherents,  grows  old  and  dies  in  a  much 
shorter  time.  Christianity,  betrayed,  corrupted,  made  to 
be  the  instrument  of  unutterable  woes,  by  its  disciples,  is 
yet  forbidden  to  die.  God  will  not  let  the  dissensions,  the 
treasons,  the  unutterable  and  abominable  profligacies,  that 
are  mortal  to  the  life  of  other  institutions,  have  any  power 
of  death  upon  it;  upholding  it  visibly  Himself,  and 
showing  by  that  sign,  as  he  could  by  nothing  else,  that 


428       THE  INTERNAL  GOVERNMENT 

the  settled  purpose  of  his  will  is  to  establish  it  as  the 
universal  religion. 

But  the  government  of  the  world  includes,  in  its  largest 
view,  the  interior  history  of  souls.  Before  we  arrive  at 
Christianity,  therefore,  what  we  there  call  the  domain  of 
the  Spirit,  and  of  spiritual  experience,  is  to  be  classed  un- 
der providential  history.  We  cite,  therefore,  in  this  con- 
nection, 

m.  As  a  distinct  argument,  the  spiritual  changes 
wrought  in  men,  and  the  testimony  given  by  the  subjects  of 
such  changes.  Nothing  is  better  attested,  than  the  fact,  that 
men  of  our  race,  whether  under  Christianity,  or  without 
any  knowledge  of  its  truths,  do  undergo  changes  of  char- 
acter and  life,  that  can  no  way  be  accounted  for,  without 
some  reference  to  a  supernatural  power,  such  as  Chris- 
tianity affirms  in  the  doctrine  of  the  Spirit.  The  subjects 
themselves,  can  nowise  account  for  the  change,  except  by 
the  supposition  of  a  divine  agency  in  them,  superior  to 
the  laws  of  natural  development,  and  also  to  any  force  of 
will  they  could  themselves  exert  on  their  own  dispositions, 
and  the  moral  habit  of  their  previous  life. 
•  To  change  the  type  of  a  character,  and  above  all,  to  do 
it  in  such  a  manner,  that,  from  and  after  a  given  date,  it 
shall  be  confessedly  different,  more  widely  different  than 
if  a  thief  were  to  become  suddenly  honest,  a  licentious 
man  suddenly  and  delicately  pure,  a  violent  gentle,  a 
cowardly  heroic — this,  it  will  be  agreed,  is  a  thing  most 
difficult  to  be  accomplished.  Many  will  even  declare  it  to 
be  impossible;  nothing  more  is  possible,  they  will  say, 
than  for  the  subjects  to  set  their  will  to  a  reformation, 
which  doubtless  they  may  do,  at  any  given  moment,  but, 
in  doing  it,  how  far  off  are  thev  still  from  any  change  of 


OF    SOULS    IS    WITH    CHRIST.  429 

character ;  persisting  against  what  struggles  of  perverse 
habit,  heaving  spasmodically  under  what  loads  of  corrup- 
tion, ready  to  fall  again,  how  easily,  back  into  what  has 
all  the  while  been  and  still  is  their  character.  But  if  they 
do,  perchance,  succeed  in  finally  changing  any  thing,  how 
slowly  must  the  change  be  wrought.  Even  as  one  habit 
gives  way  to  another,  by  a  long  and  wearisome  reiteration 
of  practice.  Exactly  so  it  is,  we  admit,  with  all  changes 
in  mere  natural  character,  all  improvements  in  the  plane 
of  the  natural  life.  If  there  is  no  force  but  mere  will, 
acting  in  this  plane,  to  change  us,  there  can  be  no  sudden 
reverse  of  character ;  no  reverse  at  all,  which  is  more  rad- 
ical than  what  the  phrenologists  give  us  to  expect,  when 
they  set  us  on  courses  of  practice,  to  increase  or  diminish, 
given  lobes  of  brain  under  the  bony  casement  of  the  skull. 
Whoever  undertakes  any  such  improvement  of  his  char- 
acter, in  a  bad  point,  doing  it  by  his  will,  we  expect  to 
see  relapse  and  fall  back.  We  have  a  way  indeed  of  say- 
ing, "  it  is  in  him,"  when  a  bad  man  is  repressing  his  par- 
ticular sin;  by  which  we  mean  to  intimate  our  convic- 
tion, that  what  is  in  him  will  assuredly  come  out  and 
show  itself,  even  more  flagrantly  than  ever.  Thus  we 
reason,  and  we  are  right  in  it,  if  no  account  be  made  of 
faith  and  the  influence  of  a  supernatural  power. 

Thus  it  was  that  Celsus  reasoned,  utterly  denying  the 
credibility  of  any  sudden  change  of  character  from  bad  to 
good,  such  as  the  Christians  spoke  of;  for,  not  being  in 
the  faith  of  Christ,  he  had  no  conception  of  the  super- 
natural efficacy  embodied  in  his  plan  of  salvation.  He 
says,  "those  who  are  disposed  by  nature  to  vice,  and 
accustomed  to  it,  can  not  be  transformed  by  punishment, 
much  less  by  mercy ;  for  to  transform  nature  is  a  matter 


430       THE  INTEENAL  GOVERNMENT 

• 

of  extreme  difficulty."  He  did  not  understand,  alas! 
what  "  mercy  "  is.  But  Origen  does.  Having  it  revealed 
in  him,  by  his  own  hoty  experience,  he  replies,  how 
beautifully,  "When  we  see  the  doctrine  Celsus  calls  fool- 
ish, operate,  as  with  magical  power,  when  we  see  how  it 
brings  a  multitude,  at  once,  from  u  life  of  lawless  excesses 
to  a  well  regulated  one,  from  unrighteousness  to  goodness, 
from  timidity  to  such  strength  of  principle,  that,  for  the 
sake  of  religion,  they  despise  even  death,  have  we  not 
good  reason  for  admiring  the  power  of  this  doctrine."* 

The  picture  given  by  Justin  Martyr  corresponds ;  at 
once  proving  itself  by  its  own  beauty,  and  revealing  the 
hand  of  the  divine  Spirit,  by  whom  it  is  wrought.  "We, 
who  once  were  slaves  to  lust,  now  delight  in  purity  of 
morals ;  we,  who  once  prized  riches  and  possessions  above 
all  things,  now  contribute  what  we  have  to  the  common 
use ;  we,  who  once  hated  and  murdered  each  other,  and, 
on  account  of  our  differences,  would  not  have  a  common 
hearth  with  those  of  the  same  tribe,  now  live  in  common 
with  them,  and  pray  for  our  enemies,  and  endeavor  to 
persuade  those  who  hate  us  unjustly,  that,  living  accord- 
ing to  the  admirable  counsels  of  Christ,  they  may  enjoy 
a  good  hope  of  obtaining  the  same  blessings  with  our- 
selves, from  God  the  ruler  of  us  all."f 

That  changes  such  as  these  are  sometimes  wrought  in 
men  and  societies  of  men,  under  the  gospel  of  Christ,  we 
certainly  know.  There  is  almost  no  one  who  has  not, 
sometime,  witnessed  such  examples.  And  yet,  where  com- 
munities are  taken,  the  results  will  be  so  far  mixed  by 
cases  of  spurious  faith,  of  hypocrisy,  of  backsliding,  and 
apostasy,  as  to  blur  and  sadly  confuse  the  evidence  dis- 

*Neander's  Mem.  Christ  Life,  p.  17.      f  Ib.,  p.  61. 


OF    SOULS    IS    WITH    CHRIST.  431 

played.  Our  best  and  least  ambiguous  examples  of  spir- 
itual renovation,  therefore,  will  be  found  in  the  case  of  in- 
dividual persons. 

The  case  of  Paul  is  familiar,  and  it  is  remarkable  that 
no  other  ancient  human  character  comes  to  us  attested,  in 
its  genuineness,  by  such  evidence.  Whatever  the  learned 
critics  say,  or  assume  to  show,  concerning  the  gospels, 
there  is  certainly  no  myth  in  the  epistles.  When  they 
come  to  these,  their  theory  breaks  down,  their  occupation 
is  gone.  That  such  a  man  as  Pliny  lived,  and  such  a  man 
as  Cicero,  is  not  as  well  attested,  or  shown  by  as  good 
evidence,  as  that  Paul  the  apostle  lived,  wrote  the  epis- 
tles ascribed  to  him,  and  bore  the  double  character,  first, 
of  a  persecutor  and  fierce  enemy  of  the  cross,  then,  by 
the  grace  of  God  revealed  in  him,  that  of  a  preacher  of 
the  cross;  sacrificing  all  things,  enduring  all  pains  and 
severities,  for  the  name  of  Christ,  his  Master.  This 
change,  he  tells  us,  was  a  change  supernaturally  wrought, 
gives  us  the  day  and  the  hour,  on  which  his  bad  career 
was  stopped,  and  shows  himself  to  us  and  all  the  world, 
from  that  moment  onward,  to  be  another  man.  From  a 
most  bitter  and  relentless  persecutor,  he  has  become  a  be- 
liever in  Christ,  the  most  powerful,  and  chief  advocate  of 
his  gospel.  A  profound  selfevidence  verifies  the  man  and 
the  change,  and  the  divine  life  in  him  is  not  less  visible. 
His  own  account  of  the  change,  which  he  testifies  openly 
in  every  place,  is  that,  "by  the  grace  of  God,"  he  is  what 
he  is — "new-created  in  Christ  Jesus  unto  good  works." 

And  of  such  examples  the  church  is  full,  in  all  ages. 
By  some  wondrous  Providence  in  souls,  if  we  do  not  ac- 
cept the  Christian  mystery  of  the  Spirit,  a  stream  of  new- 
creative  power  from  God  is  entering  into  men's  hearts, 


432 

transforming  their  lives,  and  with  this  one  uniform  result, 
that,  if  Christianity  is  a  fiction  or  a  myth,  it  makes  them, 
as  certainly  its  friends  and  disciples,  as  it  makes  them 
better  and  more  akin  to  God. 

Augustine,  for  example,  was,  before  his  conversion,  a 
less  violent  and  bloody  man  than  Paul,  had  far  less  pre- 
tense of  virtue,  and  a  much  feebler  sense  of  principle,  and 
was  in  fact  a  really  less  hopeful  person,  as  regards  the 
prospect  of  his  becoming  a  holy  character.  And  yet, 
from  a  given  moment,  onward,  which  moment  is  exactly 
specified  in  his  "Confessions,"  he  becomes  another  charac- 
ter. Neither  can  it  be  said  that  he  was  turned  about  thus 
suddenly  by  some  fit  of  superstition.  He  was  not  a  super- 
stitious character,  but  a  loose,  free-thinking,  sensual  per- 
son, whose  habit  was  opposed  to  the  spiritualities  in  every 
form.  His  own  account  of  his  conversion  is,  that  it  was 
the  prayers  of  his  saintly  mother  which  took  hold  of  him, 
drawing  down  upon  him,  from  above,  that  divine  influ- 
ence and  grace,  by  which  his  life  was  so  remarkably 
changed.  We  can  see  too,  for  ourselves,  in  his  whole 
subsequent  life,  his  action,  his  temper,  his  great  and  massive 
thoughts,  his  burning  contemplations,  that  he  is  lifted  above 
his  natural  force,  to  be  a  man  above  himself.  The  rhetori- 
cian is  gone,  and  the  apostle  has  taken  his  place. 

The  conversion  of  Eaymond  Lull,  of  Col.  Gardiner,  of 
John  Newton,  of  Dr  Nelson,  and  of  hundreds  whom  we 
know,  as  our  living  contemporaries  in  the  church,  corres- 
ponds. The  number  is  so  great  in  fact,  examples  of  the 
kind  so  familiar,  that  any  attempt  to  specify  names  must 
be  insignificant.  A  great  many  supposed  changes  of  the 
kind  turn  out,  as  we  admit,  to  have  no  sound  reality  and 
are  followed  by  no  correspondent  change  of  life.  It  would 


OF    SOULS    IS    WITH    CHRIST.  433 

be  so  as  a  matter  of  course ;  just  as  there  will  be  spurious 
examples  of  honesty,  honor,  and  courage.  But  the 
spurious  no  more  disproves  the  true  in  one  case,  than  in 
the  other.  The  question  is  simply  this,  whether,  in  given 
cases,  we  do  not  see  men  entered,  more  or  less  suddenly, 
by  what  is  called  their  conversion,  into  another  and  differ- 
ent kind  of  life ;  the  violent  becoming  gentle,  the  deceit- 
ful true,  the  covetous  unworldly  and  liberal,  the  selfish 
benevolent  and  self-denying,  profanity  changed  to  prayer, 
drunkenness  to  sobriety,  revenge  to  long-suffering,  blood- 
thirstiness  to  love  and  compassion ;  the  subject  becoming 
thus,  in  truth,  from  that  time  onward,  a  confessedly  new 
man,  in  all  these  his  several  habits  and  relations  ?  We 
are  all  familiar,  certainly,  with  such  examples.  They  are 
among  the  most  prominent  and  impressive  facts,  in  the  in- 
terior, personal  history  of  mankind.  And  they  are  so 
well  attested,  in  myriads  of  cases,  by  the  practical  results 
of  the  life,  as  to  make  the  unbelief  which  denies  their 
verity,  or  classes  them  as  examples  of  spiritual  illusion,  a 
prejudice  that  amounts  to  weakness,  or  supposes  a  real  in- 
capacity for  evidence. 

Now  in  these  changes  of  spiritual  experience,  called  con- 
versions, the  Christian  word,  and  the  truths  of  the  life  of 
Jesus,  are  commonly  supposed  to  have  an  important  instru- 
mentality. The  subjects  uniformly  say  it,  in  the  confessions 
they  witness.  They  suppose  that  God,  revealed  in  Christ, 
is  so,  by  a  transmission  inward,  revealed  in  their  conscious- 
ness. But  if  Christ  was  only  a  simple,  natural  man,  and 
if  all  which  is  reported  of  him  in  the  gospels,  transcend- 
ing the  supposition  of  his  simple  humanity,  is  wild  ex- 
cess, or  legendary  exaggeration,  the  account  which  refers 

these  inward  changes  or  conversions  to  Christ,  can  hardly 

37 


434  MEN    AKE    NOT    CONVERTED 

be  true.  That  any  mere  illusion  should  be  followed,  age 
after  age,  by  such  wondrous  and  manifestly  real  changes, 
making  human  souls  visibly  akin  to  God,  is  not  to  be 
supposed.  That  woald  be  to  account  for  the  soundest 
and  profoundest  facts  of  human  history,  by  referring  them 
to  causes  most  purely  fanciful,  and  doctrines  wide  of  all 
true  intelligence. 

Here  then  we  find  ourselves,  with  these  facts  on  our 
hands,  without  any  Christian  truth  to  account  for  them. 
For  when  we  have  dismissed  the  gospels,  or  thrown  them 
aside  as  unreliable,  or  incredible,  these  facts  are  not  anni- 
hilated. These  converts,  these  transformed  men — the 
giandest  truths,  and  most  quickening  powers,  and  most 
glorious  characters,  in  human  history — are  still  left,  living 
and  blooming  and  blessing  their  times,  for  all  these 
eighteen  centuries.  They  certainly  are  no  fictions,  or 
myths,  or  fables  of  tradition.  They  testify,  all,  that  they 
are  consciously  transformed  by  some  divine  power.  A 
kind  of  gospel  is  in  them.  God  has  wrought  in  them,  if 
Christianity  has  not.  Only  it  is  remarkable  that  when 
they  are  so  transformed  by  His  inner  visitation,  they  im- 
mediately declare  for  Christ,  and  cleave  to  him  with  ine- 
radicable affection.  We  seem  thus,  in  fact,  to  discover 
that,  as  we  are  casting  Christianity  away,  the  government 
of  the  world  is  turning  the  inmost  heart  of  the  repenting 
and  holy  toward  it,  and  giving,  in  that  manner,  indispu- 
table evidence  that  it  is  itself  willing,  whether  we  are  so 
or  not,  to  serve  in  the  interest  of  Christianity. 

It  does  not  appear  to  have  been  as  carefully  considered 
as  it  should  be,  by  the  disciples  of  naturalism,  in  what 
manner  these  converts,  and  the  testimony  they  give,  is  to 
be  disposed  of.  For,  in  our  view,  they  are  even  a  more 


BY    NATURE    OR    BY    SELF-WILL.  435 

intractable  subject  to  handle,  than  the  gospels  them- 
selves. To  deny  the  reality  of  their  change,  and  reduce 
their  whole  life  and  experience  to  a  matter  of  illusion, 
requires  a  degree  of  effrontery  and  personal  conceit,  that 
would  repel  any  critic  of  only  ordinary  intelligence.  For 
in  these  Christian  myriads,  are  grouped  almost  all  the 
greatest  scholars,  philosophers,  and  lawgivers,  the  most 
revered  and  stateliest  names,  the  most  beautiful  and  holi- 
est characters  of  Christendom. 

It  can  not  be  said  that  these  conversions  are,  in  any 
sense,  natural,  or  produced  by  natural  causes,  in  the  feel- 
ing and  condition  of  the  subjects.  Their  affinities  are  all 
visibly  transcendent,  and  their  life  itself  is,  in  one  view,  a 
kind  of  protest  againt  nature  and  withdrawment  from  it. 

They  are  not  changed,  in  this  manner,  by  their  own 
mere  will.  Whoever  believes  that  a  mortal  man  can  take 
hold  of  the  moral  jargon,  into  which  his  thoughts  and 
passions  are  cast  by  sin,  willing  himself  back,  item  by 
item,  into  peace  and  harmony  and  the  ennobled  conscious- 
ness of  good,  ought  to  be  able  to  believe  in  Christianity 
much  more  easily.  A  bad  man  may  reduce,  or  hold  in 
check,  the  evil  instigations  of  his  habit,  by  his  mere  will ; 
he  may  even  drag  himself  into  positive  acts  of  duty  and 
observance,  and  become  a  sturdy  legalist  in  the  practices 
of  virtue ;  but  to  bring  himself  out  into  a  luminous,  joy- 
ous, and  spontaneous  virtue,  and  make  himself  free  in 
good,  as  having  the  principle  installed  in  his  heart,  is  a 
different  thing.  Nothing,  in  short,  is  wider  of  all  rational 
belief,  than  that  the  converted  men  or  disciples  of  Chris- 
tianity could  make  the  beginning,  act  the  part,  fashion 
the  character,  kindle  the  fires,  and  conquer  the  elevations, 
visibly  displayed  in  their  life,  doing  it  by  their  human  will 


436  THEY    AKE    NOT    CONVERTED 

But  there  is  a  certain  inspiration,  it  may  said,  that  flows 
into  men,  from  the  ideas  they  assume.  Thus,  it  may  be 
conceived,  that  the  supposed  convert,  in  these  remarkable 
transformations  of  life  and  character,  received,  first,  a  the- 
ological preconception,  that  a  change  thus  and  thus  de- 
scribed is  necessary  to  his  salvation;  and  then,  having  his 
imagination  powerfully  excited,  by  the  struggles  of  sup- 
posed guilt  and  danger  he  is  in,  he  conceives  at  last,  that 
the  change  required  is  actually  passed  upon  him ;  where- 
upon he  is  set  forward  in  high  impulse,  into  a  new  style 
of  life,  correspondent  with  the  auspicious  hallucination  that 
has  triumphed  over  his  sin.  And  this  is  really  the  most 
plausible  account  that  can  be  made  of  these  changes  in 
the  interior  history  of  souls,  which  does  not  suppose  them 
to  be  referrible  to  a  supernatural  divine  agency  or  Prov- 
idence. 

But  what  kind  of  mind  is  it  that  can  be  satisfied  with 
one  of  its  wise  inventions,  when,  to  account  for  the  high- 
est and  divinest  range  of  fact  in  man's  spiritual  history, 
it  supposes  whole  myriads  of  the  strongest  minds,  and 
noblest  characters,  to  have  been  inspired  with  so  much 
goodness  all  their  lives  long,  by  a  hallucination  ? 

In  the  next  place,  we  are  led  to  inquire,  why  it  is  that 
men  pass  no  such  crisis  of  inspiration  in  other  matters  ? 
Whence  comes  it,  that,  having  formed  some  preconception 
of  honesty,  truth,  purity,  wisdom,  art,  the  auspicious  hal- 
lucination that  is  to  shape  their  transformation  does  not 
suddenly  take  them  up,  as  here,  and  carry  them  forward 
into  the  inspired  liberty?  Why  do  not  men  become 
heroes,  poets,  lawgivers,  in  this  manner  ?  Have  they  not 
thoughts  enough  of  being  thus  distinguished  ?  and  are  not 
such  kind  of  thoughts,  in  them,  commonly  hallucinations? 


BY    THEIR    PRECONCEPTIONS.  437 

But  it  is  not  true,  in  a  very  great  multitude  of 
cases,  that  any  such  preconception  has  been  taken  up. 
What  thought  had  Paul,  on  the  way  to  Damascus,  of 
being  converted  to  Christ  as  the  necessary  condition  of 
his  salvation?  As  little  had  Augustine,  till  his  mind 
was  opened  from  within  to  such  a  thought.  Besides,  we 
have  multitudes  of  cases  in  our  own  time,  where  any 
such  manner  of  accounting  for  the  change  of  character 
actually  wrought  is  plainly  inadequate;  cases,  for  exam- 
ple, where  there  is  too  little  of  personal  vigor  to  carry 
out  any  preconception,  even  if  a  beginning  were  made  in 
that  manner.  Thus  a  ministerial  acquaintance,  whose 
name  is  before  the  nation  and  the  world,  as  a  public 
name,  had  living  in  the  place  where  he  was  pastor, 
a  short-witted  person,  generally  taken  for  an  idiot,  who, 
in  addition  to  his  natural  disadvantages,  was  deep  in 
the  vices  of  profanity  and  drunkenness.  At  a  time  of 
general  attention  to  the  things  of  religion,  this  forlorn 
being  came  to  him  to  inquire  the  way  of  salvation.  The 
first  impulse  of  prudence  was  to  put  him  off,  as  being 
incapable  of  religious  experience,  and  as  one  who  would 
only  turn  it  into  mockery  by  his  absurdities.  On  farther 
consideration,  it  was  found  to  be  rather  a  duty  to  give 
him  even  the  greater  attention,  according  to  the  propor- 
tion of  his  want.  In  a  few  days,  it  became  a  subject  of 
mirth,  with  all  the  light-minded  class  of  the  community, 
that  this  man  was  a  convert.  The  Christian  people  looked 
on  him  with  pity,  and  were  silent ;  they  had  no  hope  of 
him.  But  from  that  hour  to  this — and  many  years  have 
now  passed  away — he  has  never  faltered  in  his  course, 
never  yielded  so  much  as  an  inch  to  his  vicious  habits. 
His  constancy  and  consistency  are  even  as  much  superior 

37* 


438  IN    MANY    CASES 

to  that  of  other  disciples,  as  his  simplicity  is  greater  than 
theirs.  He  is  always  in  his  place.  He  has  worn  out  two 
or  three  bibles,  for  he  had  before  learned  to  read  a  little, 
and  now  put  himself  to  the  task  in  earnest.  He  gets  a 
few  dollars  of  earnings,  which  he  does  not  want,  and  goes 
to  his  pastor,  requesting  him  to  apply  it  to  some  good  use, 
which  he  does  not  know  how  to  select.  When  asked  by 
his  friends — for  that  is  the  general  wonder — how  it  is  that 
his  old  habits  of  profanity  and  drunkenness  have  never 
once  gotten  advantage  of  him,  his  uniform  reply  is, 
"  Why,  I  have  seen  Jesus !"  The  critic  of  naturalism 
can  not,  of  course,  admit  any  such  mystic  notion  as  that 
— Jesus  was  a  man,  and,  if  he  is  any  thing  now,  he  is  still 
a  man.  Will  he  account  for  such  a  character,  initiated  by 
a  sudden  change,  by  supposing  a  preconception  that 
shapes  it,  and  maintains  it  against  infirmities  so  great,  for 
such  a  course  of  years?  There  is  a  much  deeper  and 
more  adequate  philosophy  in  the  subject  himself.  Take 
his  own  account  of  it,  and  the  fact  is  possible ;  take  this 
other,  and  it  is  not. 

There  are  multitudes  of  cases  also,  in  every  age,  where 
heathens  who  have  never  heard  of  Christ,  or  of  any  terms 
of  salvation  at  all,  and  sometimes  even  the  rudest  of  hea- 
thens, are  passed  into  a  manifestly  new  character,  by  a 
change  correspondent,  in  every  respect,  with  what  is  called 
conversion  under  the  gospel.  And  if  God,  as  we  main- 
tain, is  reigning  supernaturally  over  the  world  and  in  it,  to 
establish  and  complete  the  kingdom  of  his  Son,  what  shall 
we  look  for  but  to  find  sporadic  cases  of  conversion,  or 
spiritual  illumination,  even  among  the  heathen  peoples, 
before  the  knowledge  of  Christ  is  received? 

Socrates  is  best  conceived  in  this  manner,  and,  according 


THEEE    AEE    NO    PRECONCEPTIONS.         439 

to  his  own  impressions,  he  was  guided  supernaturally,  by 
a  secret  grace  and  ministry,  in  whose  teaching  he  received 
all  that  most  distinguished  his  personal  history.  Clement 
of  Eome,  as  we  have  already  observed,  was  a  man  myste- 
riously led,  as  by  some  divine  impulse,  and  appears 
to  have  come  into  the  spirit  of  a  new-born  life,  before  he 
had  even  heard  of  Christ.  In  him,  therefore,  his  heart  in- 
stantly rested,  finding  there  the  grace  that  he  wanted,  and 
the  divine  beauty  that  he  already  longed  for. 

And  what  forbids  that  we  include  in  the  reckoning  ex- 
amples of  a  class  more  wild,  where  it  is  impossible  to  sus- 
pect any  distemper  of  the  experience,  under  preconceptions 
imposed,  either  by  philosophy  or  by  the  gospel — such,  for 
example,  as  the  strange  devotee  discovered  by  Brainard, 
among  the  children  of  the  forest,  and  called  by  him  "the 
conjurer."  "He  said,"  so  Brainard  represents,  "that  God 
had  taught  him  his  religion,  and  he  wanted  to  find  others 
who  would  join  heartily  with  him  in  it.  He  believed  God 
had  some  good  people  somewhere,  who  felt  as  he  did.  He 
had  not  always  felt  as  now,  but  had  formerly  been  like 
the  rest  of  the  Indians  till  about  four  years  before  that 
time.  Then  his  heart,  he  said,  was  much  distressed,  so  that 
he  could  not  live  among  the  Indians,  but  got  away  into 
the  woods  and  lived  alone  there  for  months.  At  length, 
he  said,  God  comforted  his  heart,  and  showed  him  what 
he  should  do,  and  since  that  time  he  had  known  God,  and 
tried  to  serve  him,  and  loved  all  men,  be  they  who  they 
would,  so  as  he  never  did  before." 

Brainard  was  also  told  by  the  Indians,  "that  he  opposed 
their  drinking  strong  liquor  with  all  his  power,  and  that 
if,  at  any  time,  he  could  not  dissuade  them  from  it,  he 
would  leave  them,  and  go  crying  into  the  woods.  He  was. 


440  THE    WORK    OF    THE    SPIRIT 

looked  upon  and  derided,  among  most  of  the  In- 
dians, as  a  precise  zealot,  who  made  a  needless  noise 
about  religious  matters.  There  was  something  in  his 
temper  and  disposition  which  looked  more  like  true 
religion,  than  any  I  have  ever  observed  among  other 
heathens."* 

In  the  same  manner,  a  forlorn  woman,  discovered  by 
one  of  our  missionaries,  in  the  depths  of  Central  Africa, 
is  reported  by  him  to  have  broken  out,  in  the  most  affect- 
ing demonstrations  of  joy,  when  Christ  was  presented  to 
her  mind,  saying:  "0,  that  is  he  who  has  come  to  me  so 
often  in  my  prayers.  I  could  not  find  who  he  was !" 
And  if  God  holds  any  terms  of  society  and  reciprocal  feel- 
ing with  our  race,  what  should  we  more  naturally  expect, 
than  that  he  will  always  be  revealed,  in  this  manner,  to 
such  as  earnestly  seek  the  right,  and  give  play  to  their  in- 
born, though  distracted,  affinities,  longing  and  searching, 
if  haply  they  may  find  Him?  But  if  God  is  revealed 
thus  tenderly,  even  to  minds  in  the  darkness  of  heathen- 
ism, it  is  plain  as  it  can  be,  that  the  great,  internal  changes 
of  character  we  are  discussing,  are  not  to  be  accounted 
for  by  the  preconceptions  that  are  taken  up  and  become 
operative  in  the  subjects. 

After  all,  this  question  is  more  naturally  and  satisfacto- 
rily handled,  in  the  more  ordinary  form ;  viz.,  as  a  ques- 
tion of  Christian  experience;  what  it  is,  whether  it  sup- 
poses, necessarily,  a  supernatural  power,  and  what  is  the 
real  significance  of  the  testimony  given  by  so  many  wit- 
nesses for  Christ?  For  the  work  of  the  Spirit,  which  is 
the  Christian  conception,  is  but  another  name,  as  already 
intimated,  for  that  supernatural  Providence  or  government 

*  Memoir,  p.  174-5. 


IS    GOVERNMENT    IN    SOULS.  441 

of  the  world  in  souls;  which,  we  are  endeavoring  to  show, 
is  dispensed  in  the  interest  of  Christianity. 

Thus  we  have  vast  crowds  of  witnesses,  rising  up  in 
every  age,  who  testify,  .out  of  their  own  consciousness,  to 
the  work  of  the  Spirit,  and  the  new-creating  power  of  Je- 
sus, who,  by  the  Spirit,  is  revealed,  in  their  hearts.  In 
nothing  do  they  consent  with  a  more  hymn-like  harmony 
than  in  the  testimony  that  their  inward  transformation  is 
a  divine  work — a  new  revelation  of  God,  by  the  Spirit,  in 
their  human  consciousness.  They  are  such  men  too  as 
the  world  are  most  wont  to  believe,  on  all  other  subjects. 
Neither  has  any  one  a  particle  of  evidence  to  set  against 
their  testimony.  All  which  the  stiffest  unbeliever  can  al- 
ledge  against  them,  is  that  he  himself  has  no  such  con- 
sciousness, or  has  found  no  such  discovery  verified  to  his 
particular  experience.  They  testify,  on  their  part,  with 
one  voice,  to  a  truth  positive,  and  the  whole  opposing 
world  can  offer  nothing,  on  its  part,  against  their  testi- 
mony, but  the  simple  negative  fact  of  having  in  them- 
selves no  such  experience. 

Meantime,  their  very  word  itself  conveys  a  look  of  veri- 
similitude, and  makes  a  show  of  God,  so  necessary  to  us, 
and  so  honorable  to  Him,  that  it  challenges  the  spontane- 
ous faith  of  every  ingenuous  and  thoughtful  soul.  We 
never  hear  any  single  man  of  them  speak  of  his  better 
life  as  a  development,  or  a  something  merely  unfolded  in 
him,  by  natural  laws.  No  preacher  preaches,  no  martyr 
goes  to  the  fires  in  that  vein.  But  they  all  talk  of  their 
faith,  and  of  what  God  gives  to  their  faith ;  the  conscious 
impotence  of  all  their  struggles  with  themselves,  and  the 
easy  victory  they  find  in  God ;  how  they  are  borne  up  as 
on  eagle's  wings,  their  wonderful  light,  their  peace,  the 


442  THIS    IS    THE    WITNESS 

love  they  could  not  have  to  their  enemies,  but  now,  by 
Christ  revealed  within,  are  able  to  exercise,  unstinted  and 
free.  Consciously  they  are  not  living  in  the  plane  of  na- 
ture, they  do  and  suffer  things  which  nature  can  as  little 
do,  as  she  can  raise  the  dead.  They  conquer  their  fears, 
God  helping  their  faith.  Pride,  passion,  habit,  they  sub- 
due in  the  same  manner.  Eeligious  prejudices  also,  ani- 
mosities of  race,  the  contempt  of  learning,  and  the  bigotry 
of  schools  melt  away  in  them,  leaving  a  character  that  is 
visibly  a  new  creation.  Even  the  skeptic  who  has  come 
to  such  a  state  of  intellectual  disease,  that  he  can  no  lon- 
ger find  how  to  believe  any  thing,  is  filled  and  flooded 
with  the  light  of  God,  in  Christ  and  the  Spirit,  as  soon  as 
he  can  heartily  ask  it,  with  a  will  to  be  taught.  And  so 
we  have  a  vast  cloud  of  witnesses,  testifying  in  all  ages,  to 
the  reality  of  a  supernatural  grace,  which  is  the  root  and 
power  of  all  their  works,  and  the  hidden  spring  of  their 
unspeakable  joys.  They  know  it  to  be  so;  for  they  con- 
sciously get  their  impulse  wholly  from  without  any  terms 
of  power  in  themselves,  or  of  causality  in  nature.  They 
could  as  easily  believe  that  they  make  the  rain  in  their 
own  cisterns,  as  that  their  holy  experiences  are  not  from 
God  Himself.  So  do  they  all  testify  with  one  voice — Paul, 
Clement,  Origen,  St.  Bernard,  Huss,  Gerson,  Luther,  Fene- 
lon,  Baxter,  Flavel,  Doddridge,  Wesley,  Edwards,  Brain- 
ard,  Taylor,  all  the  innumerable  host  of  believers  that 
have  entered  into  rest,  whether  it  be  the  persecuted  saint 
of  the  first  age,  driven  home  in  his  chariot  of  blood,  or 
the  saint  who  died  but  yesterday  in  the  arms  of  his  family. 
They  live  in  the  common  consciousness  of  a  power  super- 
natural, saying — "Yet  not  I,  but  Christ  liveth  in  me." 
Nothing,  in  short,  would  violate,  or  in  real  truth  obliter- 


OF    THEIR    CONSCIOUSNESS.  443 

ate,  so  much  of  the  Christian  history,  as  to  qualify  it  down 
to  the  mere  terms  of  natural  development.  Indeed  it 
would  be  the  virtual  expurgation  from  it  of  all  the  saints 
of  God,  whatever  they  have  done,  or  been,  or  said. 

Holding  the  subject  in  this  form,  our  critics  of  the  natu- 
ralistic school  commonly  turn  their  account  of  the  matter, 
in  some  such  way  as  this.  They  say  to  Paul,  Luther, 
Knox,  Edwards,  and,  in  fact,  the  whole  church  of  God: 
"we  do  you  full  credit,  as  being  made  just  as  much  better 
men  as  you  say  you  are,  and  as  being  exercised  subject- 
ively, in  just  the  way  you  think  you  are.  You  are  only 
mistaken,  as  we  have  now  discovered,  in  respect  to  the 
manner  and  grounds  of  your  experience.  You  have 
prayed  and  thought  you  were  heard,  you  have  believed 
and  thought  your  success  was  a  gift  of  faith,  you  have 
been  strengthened  against  fears  and  pains  of  death — all 
you  that  have  been  martyrs — others  have  been  strength- 
ened in  their  times  of  temptation,  and  you  all  think  it  was 
God  who  bore  you  up  by  the  immediate  gift  of  Himself; 
but  we  are  able  now  to  tell  you  that  you  were,  so  far,  mis- 
taken. There  is  a  law  of  nature,  by  which  all  these  things 
come  to  pass,  and  it  is  so  fixed  that  nature  will  help  you 
always,  or  even  inspire  you,  just  according  to  what  you 
do.  All  this  which  you  think  comes  from  God,  by  a  re- 
generative dispensation,  is  the  development  of  nature,  by 
a  generative." 

There  would  seem  to  be  a  rather  remarkable  defect  of 
modesty  in  this  assumption,  of  which  it  can  not  be  sup- 
posed that  its  authors  are  themselves  aware.  It  not  only 
shows  the  whole  church  of  God,  that  their  conceptions  of 
Christian  experience  are  mistaken,  but  it  corrects  them  in 
precisely  that  which  they  testify,  in  the  philosophic  method 


444  THIS    IS    THE    WITNESS 

itself.  This,  they  say,  we  find  by  experiment.  It  is  not 
our  speculation,  it  is  not  any  theoretic  interpretation  put  on 
our  experience,  but  it  is  our  experience  itself.  When  they 
say  that  God  consciously  strengthens  them  in  their  day 
of  trial,  gives  them  what  to  say,  hears  their  prayers, 
keeps  them  in  peace  by  the  testimony  that  they  please 
Him,  fills  them  day  and  night  with  his  fullness,  and  our 
modern  critic  runs  to  them  to  mend  their  phraseology,  and 
shows  them  how  to  come  at  the  same  things  in  a  more 
rational  way,  even  by  letting  the  divinity  that  is  in  them 
already  have  a  free  development,  according  to  natural 
laws,  it  would  not  be  strange  if  they  should  answer  with 
a  sigh,  "  Ah  dear  child,  we  can  not  get  on  thus;  for  all 
that  bread  on  which  we  feed  is  manna  that  we  gather,  and 
not  a  loaf  that  is  hid  in  our  nature.  Turn  us  down  thus 
upon  nature  for  a  gospel,  and  our  wings  are  cut.  All 
that  we  know  of  God  and  divine  things,  we  know  by 
stretching  upward  and  away  from  nature,  and  believing 
in  God,  as  in  Christ  revealed.  Every  success  we  get, 
every  joy  we  reach,  comes  of  rejecting  just  that  method, 
by  which  thou  proposest  to  regulate  our  experience.  May 
it  not  be  that  what  thou  hast  discovered  by  reason,  has 
kept  thee  from  faith,  and  that  still  thou  needest  some  one 
to  teach  thee,  what  be  the  first  principles  of  the  doctrine 
of  Christ?" 

What  we  find  then  as  the  result  of  our  inquiry  is,  that 
the  government  of  the  world  shows  the  same  hand  which 
appears  in  the  character  and  work  of  Jesus.  In  the  first 
place,  we  discover  that  nothing  takes  place  in  the  world 
that  ought  to  take  place,  and  even  must  take  place,  if  the 
government  and  supreme  law  of  things  were  confined  to 


OF    THEIE    CONSCIOUSNESS.  445 

mere  nature  and  her  processes.  Next,  we  find  that  the 
issues  of  wars  and  discoveries,  the  migrations,  diploma- 
cies, and  great  historic  eras  of  races  and  nations,  the  extinc- 
tions and  revivals  of  learning,  and  the  persecutions  and 
corruptions,  not  less  than  the  reformations  of  churches, 
are  all  so  modulated  by  the  superintending  government  of 
the  world,  as  to  perpetuate  the  gospel  of  Christ,  and,  as  far 
as  we  can  see,  to  insure  its  ultimate  triumph.  Then  pass- 
ing into  the  interior  history  of  souls,  which,  after  all,  is  the 
chief  field  of  God's  government  in  the  earth,  we  meet  vast 
myriads  of  witnesses  in  all  the  walks  of  life,  and  in  all  the 
past  ages,  who  profess  to  know  God  in  the  witness  of  their 
internal  life  and  show,  by  tokens  manifold  and  clear,  that 
they  are  raised  above  themselves,  in  all  that  makes  the 
character  of  their  life.  To  sum  up  all  in  one  brief  ex- 
pression, we  have  found  a  New  Testament  in  the  govern- 
ment of  the  world.  It  penetrates  all  depths  of  matter, 
heaves  in  the  roll  of  the  sea,  administers  back  of  the 
thrones,  tempers  the  courses  of  history,  restraining  re- 
mainders and  excesses  of  wrath,  overturning,  conserving, 
restoring,  healing,  and  reaffirming  thus,  in  all  the  grand 
affairs  of  human  life,  without  and  within,  just  what  Christ 
the  Word  declares,  when  ascending  to  reign — All  power  is 
given  unto  me  in  heaven  and  in  earth.  What,  in  fact,  do 
we  see  with  our  eyes,  but  that  the  scheme  of  the  four  gos- 
pels is  the  scheme  of  universal  government  itself? 

38 


CHAPTER    XIV. 

MIRACLES  AND   SPIRITUAL   GIFTS  NOT  DISCONTINUED. 

IP  the  world  is  managed  supernaturally,  or  as  being  in 
the  interest  of  Christianity,  which  is  the  doctrine  main- 
tained in  the  last  chapter,  a  subordinate  and  vastly  infe- 
rior, though,  to  many,  much  more  pressing  question,  re- 
mains to  be  settled ;  viz.,  what  has  become  of  the  miracles 
and  supernatural  gifts  of  the  gospel  era?  These  were 
associated  historically  with  the  planting  of  Christianity. 
By  such  tokens  Christ  authenticated  his  mission,  giving 
the  like  signs  to  his  apostles,  to  be  the  authentication  of 
theirs.  What,  then,  it  is  peremptorily  required  of  us  to 
answer,  has  become  of  these  miracles,  these  tongues,  gifts 
of  healing,  prophecies?  what,  also,  of  the  dreams,  pre- 
sentiments, visits  of  angels?  what  of  judgments  falling 
visibly  on  the  head  of  daring  and  sacrilegious  crimes? 
what  of  possessions,  magic,  sorcery,  necromancy?  If 
these  once  were  facts,  why  should  they  not  be  now  ?  If' 
they  are  incredible  now,  when  were  they  less  so  ?  Does 
a  fact  become  rational  and  possible  by  being  carried  back 
into  other  centuries  of  time?  Is  it  given  us  to  see  that 
Christianity  throws  itself  out  boldly  on  its  facts,  in  these 
matters,  or  does  it  come  in  the  shy  and  cautious  manner 
some  appear  to  suppose,  asserting  a  few  miracles  and 
half-mythologic  marvels  that  occurred  in  the  romantic 
ages  of  history,  where  no  investigation  can  reach  them; 
adding,  to  escape  all  demand  of  such  now  in  terms  of 
present  evidence,  that  they  are  discontinued,  because 


THE    CANON    IS    CLOSED,  447 

the  canon  is  closed,  and  there  is  no  longer  any  use  for 
them? 

Such  a  disposal  of  the  question,  it  must  be  seen,  wears 
a  suspicious  look.  If  miracles  are  inherently  incredible, 
which  is  the  impression  at  the  root  of  our  modern  unbe- 
lief, evidently  nothing  is  gained  by  thrusting  them  back 
into  remote  ages  of  time.  If,  on  the  other  hand,  they  are 
inherently  credible,  why  treat  them  as  if  they  were  not? 
raising  ingenious  and  forced  hypotheses  to  account  for 
their  non-occurrence  ?  Christianity,  it  is  true,  is,  in  some 
sense,  a  complete  organization,  a  work  done  that  wants 
nothing  added  to  finish  it ;  but  it  does  not  follow  that  the 
canon  of  scripture  is  closed — that  is  a  naked  and  violent 
assumption,  supported  by  no  word  of  scripture,  and  justi- 
fied by  no  inference  from  the  complete  organization  of 
the  gospel.  For  still,  even  according  to  Christ's  own 
thought,  it  was  a  complete  mustard  seed  only;  which, 
though  it  is  complete  as  a  seed,  so  that  no  additions  can 
be  made  to  it,  has  yet,  nevertheless,  much  to  do  in  the 
way  of  growth,  and  no  one  can  be  sure  that  other  books 
of  scripture  may  not  some  time  be  necessary  for  that. 
We  do  not  even  know  that  a  new  dispensation,  or  many 
such,  mav  not  be  required  to  unfold  this  seed,  and  make 
it  the  full-grown  tree.  It  may  not  be  so.  I  have  no 
present  suspicion  that  any  such  new  contributions,  or  va- 
rieties of  ministration,  are  needed.  But  it  is  better  not  to 
assume  that  of  which  we  have  and  can  have  no  possible 
evidence;  least  of  all  are  we  called  to  do  it,  when  the 
assumption  itself  is  evidently  made  for  a  purpose,  and 
wears  a  look  of  suspicion  that  weakens  the  respect  of 
really  important  truths. 

As  little  does  it  follow  that,  if  the  canon  of  scripture  is 


BUT    IT    DOES    NOT    FOLLOW 

closed  up,  there  is  no  longer  any  use,  or  place,  for  mira 
cles  and  spiritual  gifts.  That  is  a  conclusion  taken  by  a 
mere  act  of  judgment,  when  plainly  no  judgment  of  man 
is  able  to  penetrate  the  secrets  and  grasp  the  economic 
reasons  of  God's  empire,  with  sufficient  insight,  to  affirm 
any  thing  on  a  subject  so  deep  and  difficult.  There  may 
certainly  be  reasons  for  such  miracles  and  gifts  of  the 
Spirit,  apart  from  any  authentication  of  new  books  of 
scripture.  Indeed,  they  might  possibly  be  wanted  even 
the  more,  to  break  up  the  monotony  likely  to  follow, 
when  revelations  have  ceased,  and  the  word  of  scripture 
is  forever  closed  up;  wanted  also  possibly  to  lift  the 
church  out  of  the  abysses  of  a  mere  second-hand  religion, 
keeping  it  alive  and  open  to  the  realities  of  Grod's  imme- 
diate visitation. 

And  yet,  for  these  and  such  like  reasons,  it  is  very 
commonly  assumed,  and  has  been  since  the  days  of  Chry- 
sostom,  that  miracles  and  all  similar  externalities  of  divine 
power  have  been  discontinued.  It  is  not  observed  that 
the  date  itself  is  contradicted  by  the  reasons ;  for  no  book 
of  scripture  had  then  been  written  for  at  least  two  hund- 
red and  fifty  years ;  though  the  miracles  had  never  come, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  to  any  supposed  vanishing  point,  till 
that  time.  But,  that  miracles  continued  for  two  hundred 
and  fifty  years  after  there  was  no  reason  for  them,  is  no 
great  obstruction  to  a  theory  of  the  fact  and  the  reasons, 
after  it  has  once  gained  acceptance.  Hence  there  is 
almost  nothing,  known  to  be  derived  from  the  scripture 
itself,  which  is  affirmed  more  positively,  or  with  a  more 
settled  air  of  authority,  than  this  discontinuance  of  mira- 
cles and  spiritual  gifts.  Possibly  some  may  even  take  it 
as  a  heresy  and  a  great  scandal  to  the  cause  of  truth,  to 


THAT    THE    GIFTS    AKE    DISCONTINUED.     449 

suggest  a  possibility  of  mistake  in  the  assumption.  Nay, 
there  are  probably  many  Christian  teachers  who  would 
even  think  it  a  disorder  in  God's  realm  itself,  if  now,  in 
these  modern  times,  these  days  of  science,  the  well-gradu- 
ated uniformity  of  things  were  to  be  disturbed  by  an 
irruption  of  miraculous  demonstrations.  It  would  upset 
many  whole  chapters  of  theory. 

At  the  same  tune,  there  are  classes  of  teachers  and  dis- 
ciples, now  and  then,  who  spring  up  raising  the  question 
whether  miracles  are  not  restored,  or  some  time  to  be  re- 
stored? Even  Archbishop  Tillotson  was  of  opinion  that 
they  probably  enough  might  be,  in  the  case  of  an  attempt 
to  publish  the  gospel  among  heathen  nations.'*  But  in 
all  these  cases,  the  point  is  virtually  conceded  that  mira- 
cles have  been  discontinued ;  whereas  the  truer  and  more 
rational  question  is,  whether  they  have  not  always  re- 
mained, as  in  the  apostolic  age  ?  Of  course  there  have 
been  cessations,  here  and  there,  just  as  there  have  been 
cessations  of  faith  and  decays  of  holy  living ;  just  as  there 
are  cessations  of  spiritual  influence,  for  the  same  reason ; 
though  no  one  supposes,  on  that  account,  that  the  work 
of  the  Holy  Spirit  has  been  discontinued,  and  requires  to 
be  reinstituted,  in  order  to  be  an  existing  fact.  There  is 
no  likelihood  that  a  miraculous  dispensation  would  be  re- 
stored, after  being  quite  passed  by  and  lost.  But  there 
may  be  casual  suspensions  and  reappearances,  some- 
times in  one  place,  and  sometimes  in  another,  that  are 
quite  consistent  with  the  conviction  that  the  dispensa- 
tion is  perpetual,  never  withdrawn,  and  never  to  be  with- 
drawn. 

And  this,  on  very  deliberate  and  careful  search,  appears 

*  Works,  Vol.X.,p.  230. 
38* 


450  THESE    MERE    PRODIGIES 

to  be  the  true  opinion.  We  are  able  too,  it  will  be  seen,  to 
verify  this  opinion  by  abundant  facts.  Of  course  it  is 
not  implied,  if  we  assert  the  continuance  of  these  super 
natural  demonstrations  in  all  ages,  that  they  will,  in  oui 
time,  be  mere  repetitions,  or  formal  continuations,  of  those 
which  distinguished  the  apostolic  age ;  it  must  be  enough 
that  such  works  appear,  in  forms  adapted  to  our  particular 
time  and  stage  of  advancement.  Many  persons  demand 
that  Christianity  shall  do  precisely  the  same  things  which 
it  did,  or  claims  to  have  done,  in  the  first  times ;  not  ob- 
serving that  the  doing  of  a  given  thing  is  commonly  a 
good  reason  why  it  should  not  be  done  again,  and  that 
the  great  law  of  adaptation,  which  is  a  first  law  of  reason, 
will  always  require  that  there  should  be  a  change  of  ad- 
ministration, correspondent  with  our  changes  of  state  or 
condition.  No  one  ever  charges  it  as  a  defect  of  evidence 
for  the  supernatural  gift  of  the  decalogue,  that  God  has 
not  continued,  since  that  day,  to  give  decalogues  from 
every  hill.  On  the  contrary,  when  Christ  appears,  taking 
away,  in  some  sense,  the  first  covenant,  that  he  may  estab- 
lish the  second,  we  recognize  a  degree  of  evidence  for 
both,  in  the  fact  itself  that  there  is  a  show  of  progress  in 
the  transition.  This  progress  of  manner  and  kind  we 
want  in  things  supernatural,  as  well  as  in  things  natural : 
else,  if  God  were  forever  to  repeat  his  old  works,  in  their 
old  forms,  we  should  have  a  dull  time  of  existence. 
"What,  then,  if  it  should  appear  that  our  prophesyings, 
interpretations,  healings,  and  other  such  gifts,  have  so  far 
disguised  their  form,  as  to  be  sometimes  recognized  only 
with  difficulty  ?  Instead  of  discovering  an  objection  to 
Christianity  in  the  fact,  what  have  we  in  it,  possibly,  but 
a  confirmation  of  its  rational  evidence?  And  yet  it  is 


ARE    NOT    CHRISTIANITY.  461 

chiefly  remarkable,  that  the  forms  of  the  gifts  are  con- 
tinued with  so  little  apparent  variation. 

It  is  very  obvious,  or  ought  to  be,  beforehand,  that 
these  prodigies  are  not  Christianity ;  the  substance  is  not 
in  them ;  they  are  only  signs  and  tokens  of  the  substance. 
Their  propagation,  therefore,  is  no  principal  interest  of 
Christianity,  and  the  living  power  of  Christianity  is  never 
to  be  tested  by  their  frequency,  or  the  impressiveness  of 
their  operations.  There  may  evidently  be  too  many  of 
them,  as  well  as  too  few.  As  soon  as  they  begin  to  be 
taken  for  things  principal,  or  for  the  real  substance,  they 
become  idols  and  hindrances  to  faith.  When  the  world 
that  ought  to  be  repenting  is  taken  up  with  staring,  the 
sobriety  of  faith  is  lost  in  the  gossip  of  credulity.  And 
then,  instead  of  a  solid,  ever-during  reign  of  Provi- 
dence, that  is  governing  the  world  in  the  interest  of 
Christianity,  we  should  have  a  glittering  fire-work  round 
us,  that  really  governs  nothing,  has  no  power  to  regener- 
ate souls,  or  strengthen  the  kingdom  of  Christ  in  the 
earth.  Indeed,  we  actually  see  this  folly  beginning,  in  a 
very  short  time,  to  get  possession  of  men's  minds,  and 
find  the  apostles,  on  that  account,  contending  most  delib- 
erately against  it.*  It  was  a  great  evil  that  so  many  were 
more  ready  to  figure  in  the  gifts,  or  go  after  and  admire 
the  gifts,  than  to  live  by  faith,  and  walk  with  Christ,  and 
bear  fruits  meet  for  repentance. 

It  is  our  impression,  to  speak  frankly,  that  the  party  of 
discontinuance,  and  the  party  of  restoration,  and  the  party 
also  of  denial,  who  make  so  much  of  the  fact  that  these 
prodigies  are  gone  by,  and  are  even  conceded  to  be  now 
incredible,  do  all  concur  in  a  partial  misconception  of 

*  1  Cor.,  xii-xv. 


452  USES    AND    LAWS 

their  place  in  God's  economy,  and  of  their  relative  im- 
portance to  it.  To  distinguish  truly  their  office,  we  need 
to  consider  the  two  opposite  extremes  of  character  to 
which  they  are  related.  "We  are  never  to  look  at  God's 
means,  as  being  perfect  or  not,  in  themselves;  they  are 
good  only  as  medicine  for  a  fevered  and  disordered  nature 
in  man,  requiring  also  to  be  increased,  or  withdrawn,  ac- 
cording to  the  oscillations  of  that  imperfect  and  disjointed 
nature,  as  it  swings  to  this  or  that  opposite  of  excess. 

To  see  how  these  gifts  operate,  or  what  place  they  fill, 
let  us  suppose  it  to  be  an  accepted  fact  that  God  is  reign- 
ing in  a  grand  supernatural  scheme  of  order,  and  govern- 
ing the  world,  externally  and  in  souls,  for  Christianity's 
sake;  let  it  be  understood  and  asserted  that,  even  in 
things  supernatural,  God  rules  by  eternal  and  fixed  laws ; 
and  it  will  not  be  long,  before  the  sottish  habit  of  remain- 
ing sin,  will  begin  to  settle  even  Christian  souls  into  a  stu- 
por of  intellectual  fatality.  Does  not  every  thing  continue 
as  it  was  from  the  beginning?  Prayer  becomes  a  kind  of 
dumb-bell  exercise,  good  as  exercise,  but  never  to  be  an- 
swered. The  word  is  good  to  be  exegetically .  handled, 
but  there  is  no  light  of  interpretation  in  souls,  more  im- 
mediate; all  truth  is  to  be  second-hand  truth,  never  a 
vital  beam  of  God's  own  light.  To  subside  into  sacra- 
ments, that  are  only  priestly  manipulations,  is  now  easy. 
The  drill  of  repetitions  it  is  more  readily  hoped  will 
wear  into  the  rock,  than  that  grace  will  dissolve  it.  A 
church- worship  is  easily  taken  for  piety.  Or,  if  there  be 
no  external  change  of  the  modes  of  religion,  it  is  itself 
lowered  and  disempowered,  as  much  as  if  a  lower  and 
more  earthly  form  were  chosen.  All  the  possibilities  are 
narrowed  and  shrunk  away.  Expectation  is  gone — God 


OF   SUCH    GIFTS.  463 

is  too  far  off,  too  much  imprisoned  by  laws,  to  allow  ex- 
pectation from  Him.  The  Christian  world  has  been  grav- 
itating, visibly,  more  and  more,  toward  this  vanishing 
point  of  faith,  for  whole  centuries,  and  especially  since 
the  modern  era  of  science  began  to  shape  the  thoughts  of 
men  by  only  scientific  methods.  Eeligion  has  fallen  into 
the  domain  of  the  mere  understanding,  and  so  it  has  be- 
come a  kind  of  wisdom  not  to  believe  much,  therefore  to 
expect  as  little. 

Now  it  is  this  descent  to  mere  rationality  that  makes 
an  occasion  for  the  signs  and  wonders  of  the  Spirit.  The 
unbelieving  and  false  spirit  in  half-sanctified  minds,  con- 
verts order  into  immobility,  laws  into  lethargy,  and  the 
piety  that  ought  to  be  strong  because  God  is  great,  grows 
torpid  and  weak  under  his  greatness.  Let  him  now  break 
forth  in  miracle  and  holy  gifts,  let  it  be  seen  that  he  is 
still  the  living  God,  in  the  midst  of  his  dead  people,  and 
they  will  be  quickened  to  a  resurrection  by  the  sight. 
Now  they  see  that  God  can  do  something  still,  and  has 
his  liberty.  He  can  hear  prayers,  he  can  help  them  tri- 
umph in  dark  hours,  their  bosom-sins  he  can  help  them 
master,  all  his  promises  in  the  scripture  he  can  fulfill,  and 
they  go  to  him  with  great  expectations.  They  see,  in 
these  gifts,  that  the  scripture  stands,  that  the  graces,  and 
works,  and  holy  fruits  of  the  apostolic  age,  are  also  for 
them.  It  is  as  if  they  had  now  a  proof  experimental  of 
the  resources  embodied  in  the  Christian  plan.  The  Living 
God,  immediately  revealed,  and  not  historically  only,  be- 
gets a  feeling  of  present  life  and  power,  and  religion  is  no 
more  a  tradition,  a  second-hand  light,  but  a  grace  of  God 
unto  salvation,  operative  now.  . 

But  it  will  shortly  begin  to  be  discerned,  now,  that  the 


USES    AND    LAWS 

sin-spirit  is  weak  on  the  opposite  side,  and  runs  to  the 
opposite  excess.  Before,  it  went  back  to  the  understand- 
ing, to  nature,  and  to  general  unbelief.  Now  it  rushes  on 
to  fanaticism,  and  has  even  a  pride  in  believing  things 
really  incredible.  It  does  not  follow,  because  one  heals 
the  sick,  or  speaks  with  tongues,  that  he  is  therefore  clear 
of  his  moral  infirmities,  as  a  fallen  man.  He  is  taken 
with  the  stare  of  multitudes,  gives  way  to  a  subtle 
ambition,  magnifies  overmuch  his  particular  gift,  runs 
into  shows  of  conceit,  grows  impatient  of  contradiction, 
and  loosens  the  rage  of  passion — by  that,  driving  himself 
into  even  wild  excesses  both  of  opinion  and  practice — and 
finally  coming  to  a  full  end,  as  one  burnt  up  in  the  fierce- 
ness of  his  own  heat.  As  before,  without  the  miracles 
and  the  gifts,  religion  went  down  to  extinction,  under  the 
wear  of  mere  routine,  so  now  the  miracles  and  the  gifts 
have  issued  in  a  wild  Corinthianism,  which  whole  chapters 
of  apostolic  lecture  can  hardly  reduce  to  sobriety.  And 
the  result  is,  that  now  all  the  supernatural  demonstrations 
are  brought  into  disrespect,  and  a  process  begins  of  oscil- 
lation backward,  to  the  ordinary  and  regular ;  then  toward 
rationalism  again,  unbelief,  and  spiritual  impotence. 

Now,  between  these  two  kinds  of  excess,  the  church  is 
always  swinging,  and  by  a  kind  of  moral  necessity  must 
be.  It  is  not  that  Grod's  administration  is  irregular  and 
desultory,  but  that  such  is  the  unsteadiness  and  unreliable- 
ness  of  our  poor  disjointed  humanity.  The  oscillation 
back  toward  order  and  reason,  is  commonly  longer  and 
more  gradual ;  that  toward  miracles  and  gifts,  shorter  and 
sharper,  because  there  is  more  heat  and  celerity  in  it,  and 
less  time  is  requisite  to  bring  it  to  its  limit. 

It  need  hardly  be  observed  that  every  outbreak  of 


OF    THE    GIFTS.  455 

supposed  miracle  and  supernatural  demonstration  has 
run  its  career  in  just  this  manner.  It  has  begun  with  a 
most  fervent  seeking  unto  God,  and  a  remarkable  single- 
ness of  devotion  to  Christ.  The  mighty  works  appeared 
as  revelations  of  divine  power,  scarcely  expected  by 
the  subjects  themselves,  and  there  was  no  excess,  except 
as  the  ideas  and  maxims  of  a  non-expectant  piety  in  the 
church,  were  scandalized  by  such  displays  of  God.  But 
there  was  ho  sufficient  balance  in  the  moral  infirmities  of  a 
state  of  sin,  to  keep  down  the  passions,  and  hold  in  check 
the  wildness  of  conceit,  and  the  consequence  was,  that 
the  subjects,  unable  to  distinguish  what  was  from  God, 
and  what  from  themselves,  took  their  thoughts  for  oracles, 
and  their  fancies  for  visions,  and  very  shortly  ran  the 
true  work  of  God  in  them,  into  the  ground.  So  it  has 
been  hitherto,  and  so  it  probably  will  be,  till  some  age  or 
state  is  reached,  where  men  are  sufficiently  modulated 
and  sobered  by  truth,  to  have  the  heavenly  gifts  in  terms 
of  heavenly  order,  and  be  fired  with  all  highest  mount- 
ings of  love,  without  setting  on  fire  also  the  course  of  na- 
ture, in  their  corrupted  hearts  and  bodies.  Then  the  oscil- 
lations, of  which  we  have  spoken,  will  cease,  the  ordinary 
and  regular  life  will  be  raised  up  to  meet  the  extraordi- 
nary, and  become  a  state  of  immediate  divine  knowledge 
and  experience.  Then  the  extraordinary,  the  miracles 
arid  gifts,  will  lose  out  their  explosive  violence,  and  be- 
come the  steady,  calculable  quantities  of  a  really  godly 
life.  That  is  the  true  kingdom  of  God,  fulfilled  in  its  idea — 
His  tabernacle  pitched  with  men.  "Life  is  new  an  open 
state  of  first-hand  experience,  full  of  God,  where  the  young 
men  see  visions,  and  the  old  men  dream  dreams,  without 
becoming  either  visionary  or  dreamy  in  their  excesses 


456  WHY    THE    LYING    WONDERS 

where  feeling  and  reason  coalesce,  and  the  dear  humility 
of  love  chastens  all  the  flaming  victories  of  faith  and 
prayer. 

It  has  been  a  very  common  thing  with  Christian  teach- 
ers, and  even  with  the  writers  of  deliberate  history,  to 
discredit  all  appearances  of  supernatural  wonders,  such 
as  miracles  and  spiritual  gifts,  because  they  make  so  bad 
a  figure  in  the  end.  "Whereas  the  true,  and  only  true  test 
of  them  is  their  beginning.  We  may  as  well  test  the 
opposite  oscillation  in  this  manner,  and  because  it  ends  in 
the  state  of  unbelief  and  all  impotence — a  religion  without 
life  and  sanctifying  power — have  it  as  our  conclusion  that 
the  convictions  of  order  and  holy  regularity,  which  it  set 
up  at  the  beginning,  are  a  dismal  and  cold  illusion,  dis- 
honored by  its  fruits.  It  is,  doubtless,  true  that,  as  men 
judge,  the  excesses  of  fanaticism  are  less  respectable  than 
the  excesses  of  deadness  and  immobility.  It  is  so,  be- 
cause the  common  vote  of  the  world  is  on  that  side,  mak- 
ing it  always  a  most  creditable  thing  to  live  in  such  dead- 
ness  to  God  and  all  holy  things,  as  answers  no  one  of  the 
intelligent  uses  of  life.  But  whoever  ponders  thought- 
fully the  question,  will  find  ample  room  to  doubt,  which 
is  really  widest  of  a  just  respect,  the  excesses  of  fanaticism 
and  false  fire,  or  the  comatose  and  dull  impotence  of  a 
religion  that  worships  God  without  expectation. 

It  may  occur  to  some,  to  raise  the  question,  why  it  is, 
that  the  lying  wonders  of  necromancy,  and  magic,  and 
demoniacal  possessions,  are  wont  to  be  grouped  contem- 
poraneously with  the  true  wonders  of  prophecy  and  di- 
vine gifts.  The  answer  is  readily  supplied  by  the  general 
solution  of  the  subject  here  offered.  The  two  kinds, 
probably,  are  not  strictly  contemporaneous,  and  it  is  very 


ARE    ATTENDANT.  457 

.likely  that  the  bad  wonders  will  precede  the  others;  even 
as  they  seem  to  do  just  at  this  particular  crisis.  For,  after 
all  the  facts  and  functions  of  religion  are  reduced  to  a 
second-hand  character — a  reported  history,  a  contrived  and 
reasoned  dogma,  a  drill  of  observances,  where  no  fire 
burns,  and  no  glimpses  into  eternity  are  opened  by 
visions  and  revelations  of  the  Lord,  or  where  no  God  ap- 
pears to  be  found,  who  is  nigh  enough  to  support  ex- 
pectation in  his  worshipers — then,  at  length,  even  the  outer 
people  of  unbelief  begin  to  ache  in  the  sense  of  vacuity, 
and  there,  not  unlikely,  the  pain  is  first  felt.  Their  relig- 
ious and  supernatural  instincts  have  been  so  long  defraud- 
ed, that  it  would  be  a  kind  of  satisfaction  to  get  the  silence 
broken,  if  only  by  some  vision  of  a  ghost — any  thing  to 
show  or  set  open  the  world  unknown.  They  would  even 
go  hunting,  with  Clement,  for  some  one  to  raise  them  a 
spirit.  Hence  the  strange  zeal  observable  in  the  new 
sorcery  of  our  day.  Why,  it  shows  the  other  world 
as  a  living  fact !  proves  immortality !  does  more  than  any 
gospel  ever  did  to  certify  us  of  these  things !  But  the 
secret  of  this  greedy,  undistinguishing  haste  of  delusion 
is  the  sharpness  of  the  previous  appetite ;  and  that  was 
caused  by  the  abstinence  of  long  privation.  We  had  so 
far  come  into  the  kingdom  of  nullities — calling  it  the 
kingdom  of  God — we  had  become  so  rational,  and 
gotten  even  God's  own  liberty  into  such  close  terms  of 
natural  order,  that  the  immediate,  living  realities  of  re- 
ligion, or  religious  experience,  were  under  a  doom  of  sup- 
pression. It  was  as  if  there  were  no  atmosphere  to 
breathe,  and  the  minds  most  remote  from  the  impressions 
and  associations  of  piety,  naturally  enough  felt  the  hunger 
first.  Which  hunger,  alas !  they  are  thinking  to  feed,  by 

39 


458  SPORADIC    CASES,    DOUBTLESS, 

a  superstitious  trust,  in  the  badly  written,  silly  oracles  of 
our  new-discovered,  scientific  necromancy.  But  the  church, 
also,  or  Christian  discipleship,  begins  of  course  to  ache  with 
the  same  kind  of  pain,  feeling  after  some  way  out  of  the 
dullness  of  a  second-hand  faith,  and  the  dryness  of  a 
merely  reasoned  gospel,  and  many  of  the  most  longing, 
most  expectant  souls,  are  seen  waiting  for  some  livelier, 
more  apostolic  demonstrations.  They  are  tired,  beyond 
bearing,  of  the  mere  school  forms  and  defined  notions ; 
they  want  some  kind  of  faith  that  shows  God  in  living 
commerce  with  men,  such  as  he  vouchsafed  them  in  the 
former  times.  And  if  we  can  trust  their  report,  they  are 
not  wholly  disappointed.  Probably  enough,  therefore, 
there  may  just  now  be  coming  forth  a  more  distinct  and 
widely-attested  dispensation  of  gifts  and  miracles,  than 
has  been  witnessed  for  centuries.  If  so,  it  will  raise  great 
expectations  of  the  speedy  and  last  triumph  of  holiness 
in  the  earth.  But  these  expectations  may  be  delayed. 
By  and  by  the  subjects  of  the  gifts,  or  those  who  think 
to  go  beyond  them,  may  begin  to  approach  the  bad  ex- 
treme on  this  side.  Ambition  may  stimulate  pretense, 
and  the  false  heat  of  passion.  Then  come  wild  excesses ; 
then  a  general  collapse,  in  which  the  wonders  cease. 
And  perhaps  only  this  may  be  gained;  that  the 
sense  of  something  more  immediate  than  a  religion  of 
second  causes  has  been  burned  into  Christian  souls, 
which  it  will  take  a  century  or  two  to  exhaust.  How- 
ever, as  the  sense  of  laws  becomes  more  pervasively 
fixed  in  human  thought,  it  is  allowed  us  to  believe  that, 
as  the  gifts  are  themselves  dispensed  by  fixed  laws,  the 
church  will  gradually  come  to  be  in  them  in  that  manner, 
and  hold  them  in  the  even  way  of  intelligence. 


IN    ALL    THE    PAST    AGES.  459 

Holding  this  general  view  of  miracles,  and  supernat- 
ural gifts,  it  should  not  surprise  us  to  find  sporadic  cases 
reported  here  and  there,  in  this  or  that  age  of  the  world ; 
as  little,  to  fall  on  periods  in  the  church  history,  where 
large  bodies  of  disciples,  driven  out  into  exile,  or  perse- 
cuted and  hunted  in  their  own  country,  are  brought  so 
close  to  God,  and  opened  so  completely  to  his  Spirit,  as 
to  become  prophets,  and  doers  of  mighty  works.  It  may 
not  be  true  in  any  age  of  the  world,  and  probably  is  not, 
that  such  gifts  are  absolutely  discontinued;  so  that  no 
supernatural  wonder  of  any  kind  takes  place.  Such  won- 
ders will  vary  their  form ;  but  in  some  form,  scriptural  or 
providential,  ancient  or  new,  social  or  only  personal,  they 
could  be  distinguished  probably  by  any  one,  having  a 
sufficient  knowledge  of  facts. 

What  is  wanted,  therefore,  on  this  subject,  in  order  to 
any  sufficient  impression,  is  a  full,  consecutive  inventory 
of  the  supernatural  events,  or  phenomena  of  the  world. 
There  is  reason  to  suspect  that  many  would,  in  that  case, 
be  greatly  surprised  by  the  commonness  of  the  instances. 
Could  they  be  collected  and  chronicled,  in  their  real 
multitude,  what  is  now  felt  to  be  their  strangeness  would 
quite  vanish  away,  and  possibly  they  would  even  seem  to 
recur,  much  as  in  the  more  ancient  times  of  the  world. 
But  no  such  revision  of  history  is  possible.  The  material 
is  accessible  only  in  the  most  partial  manner,  and,  if  it 
were  all  at  hand,  could  not  be  managed,  or  even  be 
summed  up,  in  such  a  recapitulation  as  our  present  limits 
will  permit. 

The  first  thing  arrived  at,  by  any  one  who  prosecutes 
this  kind  of  inquiry,  apart  from  all  prepossessions  and 
saws  of  tradition,  will  certainly  be,  that  the  clumsy  as 


460  SUCH    GIFTS    APPEAR 

sumption  commonly  held,  of  a  cessation  of  the  original, 
apostolic  gifts,  at  about  some  given  date,  is  forever  ex 
ploded;  for,  as  in  fact  they  never  consented  to  be 
stayed  or  concluded  by  any  given  time,  so  in  history 
they  persist  in  running  by  all  time,  till  finally  the  investi- 
gator, unable  to  set  down  any  date  after  which  they 
were  not,  comes  into  the  discovery  that  the  stream  is  a 
river,  flowing  continuously  through  all  ages,  and  always 
to  flow.  He  could  not  give  us  the  wonders  of  Ignatius, 
Polycarp,  Justin  Martyr,  Athenagoras,  Ireneus,  Tertul- 
lian,  Origen,  and  there  declare  the  point  of  cessation  to 
be  reached.  He  would  not  come  down  to  Cyprian,  or 
Augustine,  and  settle  it  there,  or  down  to  Paul  the  Her- 
mit, and  settle  it  there.  The  dreams  of  Huss,  the  proph- 
esyings  of  Luther,  and  Fox,  and  Archbishop  Usher,  the 
ecstasies  of  Xavier,  with  innumerable  other  wonders,  and 
visitations  of  God,  in  the  saints  of  the  church,  during  all 
the  intervening  ages,  bridge  the  gulf  between  us  and  the 
ancient  times,  and  bring  us  to  a  question  of  miracles  and 
gifts,  as  a  question  of  our  own  day  and  time.  Such 
demonstrations  became  more  nearly  frivolous,  when  every 
thing  was  frivolous,  and  more  visibly  infected  with  super- 
stition, when  the  church  itself  fell  under  the  shadow  of 
this  baleful  power;  but,  though  the  evidences  of  super- 
natural facts  were  correspondently  diminished,  there  was 
never  any  sufficient  reason  for  the  conclusion  that  they 
were  quite  gone  by  and  finally  discontinued. 

It  has  been  a  subject  of  wonder,  that  Mr.  Newman, 
with  all  his  remarkable  powers  as  a  writer,  and  a  man  of 
genius,  should  venture  on  the  deliberate  attempt  to 
vindicate  the  authenticity  of  the  church  miracles.  And, 
probably  enough,  it  is  a  fair  subject  of  wonder,  consider 


TV     ALL    AGES. 

ing  that  his  purpose  required  him  to  vindicate  as  well 
those  which  are  trivial  and  ridiculous  as  those  which  wear 
the  dignity  of  truth  and  reason.  His  argument  must,  of 
course,  break  down,  under  such  a  load  of  absurdities ;  but 
it  does  not  follow  that  a  more  discriminative  argument, 
unencumbered  by  church  restrictions,  would  not  fare 
differently. 

Descending  now  to  the  times  we  call  modern,  the  times, 
for  example,  subsequent  to  the  Reformation,  nothing  is 
easier,  exactly  contrary  to  the  very  common  impression, 
than  to  show  that  the  same  kind  of  prodigies  are  current 
here,  in  the  last  three,  as  in  the  first  three  centuries  of  the 
church.  Whoever  has  read  that  Christian  classic  "The 
Scots  Worthies"  has  followed  a  stream  of  prophecies,  and 
healings,  and  visible  judgments,  and  specific  answers  to 
prayer,  and  discernments  of  spirits,  corresponding,  at  all 
points,  with  the  gifts  and  wonders  of  the  apostolic  age. 
And  the  men  that  figure  in  these  gifts  and  powers,  are 
the  great  names  of  the  heroic  age  of  religion  in  their 
country — Wishart,  Knox,  Erskine,  Craig,  Davidson, 
Simpson,  Welch,  Guthrie,  Blair,  Welwood,  Cameron,  Car- 
gill,  and  Peden.  And  it  is  a  curious  fact,  in  regard  to 
this  great  subject,  that,  while  we  believe  so  little,  and 
deny  so  much,  and  hold  so  many  opposite  assumptions, 
this  same  book  of  Howie,  that  chronicles  in  beautiful 
simplicity  more  gifts  and  wonders  than  all  of  Irving's, 
is  published  by  one  of  the  largest  and  most  conservative 
bodies  of  Christians  in  our  country,  and  is  read  by  thou- 
sands, young  and  old,  with  eager  delight.  Is  it  that  we 
like  miracles  and  supernatural  wonders,  so  far  off  that  we 
need  not,  or  that  we  can,  believe  them  ? 

At  a  later  period,  on  the  repeal  of  the  edict  of  Nantz, 
39* 


462      THEY  APPEAR  SUBSEQUENTLY 

and  in  the  persecutions  that  followed,  a  large  body  of 
the  Protestant  or  Keformed  disciples,  called  Huguenots, 
hunted  by  their  pursuers,  fled  to  the  mountains  of  Ce- 
vennes.  Some  of  them  also  escaped  to  England  and 
other  Protestant  countries.  Among  these  unhappy  peo- 
ple the  miraculous  gifts  were  developed,  and  by  them 
were  more  or  less  widely  disseminated  abroad.  They  had 
tongues  and  interpretations  of  tongues.  They  had  healings, 
and  the  discerning  of  spirits.  They  prophesied  in  the  Spirit. 
Intelligent  persons  went  out  from  Paris,  to  hear,  observe, 
and  make  inquiry,  and  these  people  were  much  discussed  as 
"Les  Trembleurs  des  Cevennes."  In  England  they  were 
also  discussed,  as  the  "French  Prophets,"  and  the  fire 
they  kindled  in  England,  caught  among  some  of  the 
English  disciples,  and  burned  for  many  years.* 

About  forty  years  after  this  appearing  of  the  gifts 
among  the  Huguenots,  a  very  similar  development  ap- 
peared among  the  Catholic  or  Jansenist  population  of  Paris. 
Cures  began  to  be  wrought  at  the  tomb  of  Saint  Medard, 
and  particularly  of  persons  afflicted  with  convulsions. 
And,  as  the  Jansenists  were,  at  this  time,  under  persecu- 
tion at  the  hands  of  the  Jesuits,  and  bearing  witness,  as 
they  believed,  for  the  truth  of  Christ,  it  is  not  wonderful 
that  they  began  to  be  exercised,  much  as  the  Hugue- 
nots of  the  Cevennes  had  been.  They  had  the  gift  of 
tongues,  the  discerning  of  spirits,  and  the  gift  of  prophe- 
sying. These  were  called  "Convulsionnaires  de  Saint 
Medard,"  because  of  the  extatic  state  into  which  they 
seemed  to  be  raised,  f 

The  sect  of  Friends,  from  George  Fox  downward,  have 

*  Morning  Watch,  VoL  IV.,  p.  383.         fib.,  Vol.  IV.,  p.  385. 


TO    THE    REFORMATION.  463 

had  it  as  a  principle,  to  expect  gifts,  revelations,  discern- 
ings  of  spirits,  and  indeed  a  complete  divine  movement. 
Thus  Fox,  over  and  above  his  many  revelations,  wrought, 
as  multitudes  believed,  works  of  healing  in  the  sick. 
Take  the  following  references  from  the  Index  of  his 
"Journal,"  as  affording,  in  the  briefest  form,  a  conception 
of  the  wonders  he  was  supposed,  and  supposed  himself  to 
have  wrought;  "  Miracles  wrought  by  the  power  of  God — 
The  lame  made  whole — The  diseased  restored — A  distracted 
woman  healed — A  great  man  given  over  by  physicians  re- 
stored— Speaks  to  a  sick  man  in  Maryland,  who  was  raised 
up  by  the  Lord's  power — Prays  the  Lord  to  rebuke  J.  C's 
infirmity,  and  the  Lord  by  his  power  soon  gave  him  ease.' 
Led  on  thus  by  Fox,  the  Friends  have  always  claimed 
the  continuance  of  the  original  gifts  of  the  Spirit  in  the 
apostolic  age,  and  have  looked  for  them,  we  may  almost 
say,  in  the  ordinary  course  of  their  Christian  demonstra- 
tions. We  are  not  surprised,  therefore,  to  find  such  a 
man  of  policy  and  incomparable  shrewdness  as  Isaac  T. 
Hopper,  believing  as  firmly  in  the  prophetic  gifts  of  his 
friend,  Arthur  Howell,  as  in  those  of  Isaiah,  or  Paul. 
This  Howell  was  a  preacher  and  leather  currier  in  Phila- 
delphia, a  man  of  perfect  integrity  in  all  the  business  of 
his  life,  and  also  a  most  gentle  and  benignant  soul,  in 
all  his  intercourse  and  society  with  men.  One  Sunday 
morning,  on  his  way  to  Germantown,  he  met  a  funeral  pro- 
cession, when,  knowing  nothing  of  the  deceased,  "  it  was 
suddenly  revealed  to  him,"  so  says  the  history,  "that  the 
occupant  of  the  coffin  before  him  was  a  woman,  whose 
life  had  been  saddened  by  the  suspicion  of  a  crime  which 
she  never  committed.  The  impression  became  strong  on 
his  mind,  that  she  wished  him  to  make  certain  statements 


464  THESE    GIFTS    APPEAR 

at  her  funeral.  When  the  customary  services  were  fin- 
ished, Arthur  Howell  rose  and  asked  permission  to  speak. 
"I  did  not  know  the  deceased  even  by  name,"  said  he, 
"but  it  is  given  me  to  say  that  she  suffered  much,  and  un- 
justly. Her  neighbors  generally  suspected  her  of  a  crime 
that  she  did  not  commit;  and,  in  a  few  weeks  from  this 
time,  it  will  be  clearly  made  manifest  that  she  was  inno- 
cent. A  few  hours  before  her  death,  she  talked  on  this 
subject  with  the  clergyman  who  attended  upon  her,  and 
who  is  now  present;  and  it  is  now  given  me  to  declare 
the  communication  she  made  to  him  on  that  occasion." 

He  then  proceeded  to  relate  the  particulars  of  the  inter- 
view ;  to  which  the  clergyman  listened  with  evident  aston- 
ishment. When  the  communication  was  finished,  he  said, 
"I  do  not  know  who  this  man  is,  or  how  he  has  obtained 
information  on  this  subject ;  but  certain  it  is,  that  he  has 
repeated,  word  for  word,  a  conversation  which  I  supposed 
was  known  only  to  myself  and  the  deceased."*  The  ex- 
planation came,  it  is  added,  in  exact  accordance  with 
Howell's  promise. 

We  are  brought  down,  thus,  to  our  own  age  and  time — 
is  it  credible  that  the  apostolic  gifts  and  all  the  original 
wonders  of  the  church  are  extant,  -or  in  real  bestowment, 
even  now?  My  argument  does  not  imperatively  require 
it  of  me  to  go  this  length,  and  say  that  they  are.  It  is  only 
a  little  better  sustained  on  the  supposition  that  they  are. 
I  am  well  aware,  at  the  same  time,  that  a  sober  recapitu- 
lation of  what  appear  to  be  the  facts  of  the  question,  will 
appear  to  many  to  be  even  a  kind  of  weakness.  Enough 
that,  consciously  to  myself,  it  requires  a  much  stronger 
balance  of  equilibrium,  and  a  much  firmer  intellectual  jus- 

*Life  of  Isaac  T.  Hopper,  pp.  258-60. 


IN     OUR    OWN    TIME.  465 

tice,  saying  nothing  of  the  necessary  courage,  to  report 
these  facts,  without  any  protestations  of  dissent  or  dis- 
credit, than  it  would  to  toss  them  by,  with  derision,  in 
compliance  with  the  mere  conventional  notions,  and  cur- 
rent judgments  of  the  times.  I  shall  therefore  dare  to  re- 
port as  true,  facts  which,  neither  I,  nor  any  body  else,  has 
even  so  much  as  a  tolerable  show  of  reason  for  denying 
or  treating  with  lightness. 

How  many  cases  of  definite  answers  to  prayers,  such  as 
are  reported  in  the  cases  of  Stilling,  Franke,  and  others, 
are  brought  to  our  knowledge,  every  week  in  the  year. 
Cases  of  definite  premonition  are  reported  so  familiarly 
and  circumstantially,  as  to  make  a  considerable  item  in 
the  newspaper  literature  of  our  time.  Prophecies  of  good 
men,  or  sometimes  of  poets  and  other  literary  men,  are  so 
often  and  particularly  fulfilled,  as  to  be  the  common  won- 
der of  the  merely  curious,  who  profess  no  faith  in  their 
verity,  as  communications  from  God.  Dreams  are  reported, 
how  often,  foreshadowing  facts,  in  a  manner  so  peculiar,  as 
to  forbid  any  supposition  of  accident,  under  conditions  of 
chance.  The  state  of  trance  is  exemplified  in  Flavel  and 
Tennent,  and  indeed  hundreds  of  others,  as  remarkably  as 
in  Paul,  in  his  vision  of  the  third  heaven.  Cases  are  re- 
ported in  every  community,  where  the  defiant  wrath  of 
blasphemy  has  been  suddenly  struck  down,  as  by  some 
bolt  of  invisible  judgment;  others,  where  a  slowly  coming 
retribution  has  so  exactly  retaliated  the  shape  of  a  sin,  as 
to  raise  the  impression,  that  nothing  but  some  directing 
will  of  God  can  account  for  the  correspondence.  A  great 
sensation  was  made  in  the  Christian  world,  only  a  few 
years  ago,  by  the  recurrence  of  tongues,  healings,  prophe- 
cies, and  other  gifts,  both  in  London,  as  connected  with 


466  THESE    GIFTS    APPEAR 

the  preaching  of  Mr.  Irving,  and  at  Port  Glasgow  in  Scot- 
land, in  the  more  humble  but  not  less  respectable  demon- 
strations of  the  two  MacDonalds.  The  question  has  been 
very  summarily  disposed  of,  and  the  conclusion  has  been 
generally  taken,  that  these  reported  cases  of  spiritual  gifts 
were  unworthy  of  credit — mere  hallucinations  of  the  par- 
ties concerned.  On  a  deliberate  revision  of  the  question, 
I  am  induced  to  admit,  and,  since  I  have  it,  to  express, 
a  very  different  impression.  These  MacDonalds,  for  ex- 
ample, are  men  of  unimpeachable  character,  one  of  them, 
as  will  be  seen,  from  the  cogent  articles  he  wrote,  remon- 
strating against  the  new  churchism  taken  up  at  length  by 
Mr.  Irving,  a  man  of  great  calmness,  and  remarkably 
well  poised  in  the  balance  of  his  understanding.  And 
yet  this  man  is  not  only  gifted  with  a  power  of  heal- 
ing the  sick,  but  he  is  overtaken  unexpectedly  with  the 
strange  gift  of  tongues ;  viz.,  an  extatic  utterance,  in  words 
and  sounds,  which  neither  he,  nor  any  that  hear  him,  un- 
derstand. Now  there  is  nothing  in  this  apparent  gibber- 
ish, that  could  any  how  become  a  temptation  to  the  enthu- 
siast or  the  pretender.  It  seems,  at  first  view,  to  be  an 
exercise  so  wide  of  intelligence,  as  to  create  no  impression 
of  respect.  And  for  just  that  reason  it  has  the  stronger 
evidence  when  it  occurs ;  for,  notwithstanding  all  that  is 
said  by  the  commentators  about  tongues  imparted  for  the 
preaching  of  the  gospel,  I  have  found  no  one  of  all  the 
reported  cases  of  tongues,  in  which  the  tongue  was  intelli- 
gible, either  to  the  speaker  or  the  hearers,  except  as  it  was 
made  so  by  a  supernatural  interpretation — which  accords 
exactly,  also,  with  what  is  said  of  tongues  in  the  New 
Testament.  And  yet,  on  second  thought,  they  have  all 
the  greater  dignity  and  propriety,  for  just  the  reason  that 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIME.  467 

they  require  another  gift  to  make  them  intelligible.  For 
this  gift  of  tongues,  representing  the  Divine  Spirit  as  play- 
ing the  vocal  organs  of  a  man,  which  are  the  delivering 
powers  of  intelligence  in  his  organization,  is  designed  to 
be  a  symbol  to  the  world  of  the  possibility  and  fact  of  a 
divine  access  to  the  soul,  and  a  divine  operation  in  it — a 
symbol  more  expressive,  in  fact,  than  any  other  could  be. 
And  then  it  is  the  more  exactly  appropriate  in  its  adapt- 
ation, that  it  wants  another  gift  in  the  hearer,  exactly  cor- 
respondent, to  understand  it  or  give  the  interpretation. 
For  so  it  is  with  all  revelations  of  the  Spirit,  they  are  not 
only  uttered  or  penned  by  inspiration,  but  they  want  a 
light  of  the  Spirit  in  the  receiver,  to  really  apprehend  their 
power.  Not  even  the  prophets  understood  their  visions. 
Besides,  there  is,  I  know  not  what,  sublimity  in  this  gift 
of  tongues,  as  related  to  the  great  mystery  of  language; 
suggesting,  possibly,  that  all  our  tongues  are  from  the 
Eternal  Word,  in  souls;  there  being,  in  his  intelligent 
nature  as  Word,  millions  doubtless  of  possible  tongues,  that 
are  as  real  to  him  as  the  spoken  tongues  of  the  world. 

Tongues  were  also  spoken  every  week  in  London,  and 
there  was  much  discussion  there  of  the  case,  in  particular, 
of  Miss  Fancourt  as  a  case  of  healing.  She  was  a  crip- 
ple, reduced  to  a  bed-ridden  state,  by  a  curve  of  the 
spine,  and  the  painful  disorder  of  almost  all  the  joints  of 
her  body.  She  had  been  lying  for  two  years  on  a  couch, 
padded  and  curved,  to  suit  her  distorted  form.  Her 
family  belonged  to  the  established  church,  and  she  was 
herself  a  deeply  Christian  person.  A  Christian  friend,  who 
had  been  greatly  interested  in  her  behalf,  called  one  eve- 
ning, when  the  subject  of  miraculous  healing  was  dis- 
cussed. The  friend,  Mr.  Graves,  was  a  believer  in  suck 


468  OPINIONS    OP    THINKING    MEN 

gifts,  but  Mr.  Fancourt,  the  father,  a  genuinely  Christian 
person,  was  not.  After  a  time,  he  disappeared,  and 
during  his  absence  from  the  room,  Mr.  Gr.  arose,  as  Miss 
F.  supposed,  to  take  his  leave.  But  instead  of  the  "  good 
night "  she  expected,  he  commanded  her  to  stand  on  her 
feet  and  walk.  Forthwith  she  rose  up,  stood,  walked,  was 
clear  of  her  pains,  took  on  all  the  characters  of  a  well 
person,  and  so  continued.  A  great  discussion  was  raised 
immediately  in  the  public  journals,  and  particularly  be- 
tween the  Morning  Watch  and  the  Christian  Observer ;  in 
which  the  Observer  took  precisely  the  ground  of  Mr.  Hume, 
as  respects  the  credibility  of  miracles  performed  now ;  insist- 
ing that,  henceforth,  since  the  scripture  time,  "we  must  ad- 
mit any  solution  rather  than  a  miracle."  Little  wonder  is 
it  that  we  have  difficulty  in  sustaining  the  historic  facts  of 
Christianity,  when  the  most  Christian,  most  evangelic 
teachers,  assume,  so  readily,  the  utter  incredibility  of  any 
such  gifts  and  wonders  as  the  gospels  report,  and  as  they 
themselves  have  it  for  a  righteousness  to  believe. 

But  the  doubt  will  be  thrust  upon  us  here,  at  the  out- 
set, as  we  come  down  to  our  own  times — and  it  might  as 
well  be  discussed  here,  before  we  proceed  to  other  cases  in 
hand — whether  such  things  are  really  credible  now,  or  en- 
titled to  even  so  much  as  the  respectful  consideration  of 
thinking  men.  And  I  make  no  question  that  the  class 
called  thinking  men,  in  our  age,  will  be  ready,  with  few 
exceptions,  to  reject,  in  the  gross,  and  without  hesitation, 
all  such  pretended  facts.  They  are  the  illusions,  it  will  be 
said,  of  ignorant  minds,  weakened  by  superstition,  heated 
by  religious  enthusiasm  ;  stories  that  are  published,  it  may 
be,  with  honest  intentions,  but  which  any  philosopher 
will  dismiss  without  a  moment's  consideration. 


HAVE    LITTLE    AUTHORITY    HERE.  469 

But  whoever  is  ready,  in  this  manner,  I  reply,  to  erect 
the  thinking  men  of  an  age,  into  a  tribunal  of  authori- 
tative judgment  on  such  questions,  has  studied  history  to 
little  purpose.  There  certainly  is  such  a  thing  as  religious 
delusion,  or  a  faith  of  ignorance,  in  the  world,  and  the 
humbler  class  of  people  are  somewhat  more  exposed  to 
this  kind  of  infirmity.  But  their  demonstrations  have 
never  been  as  eccentric,  or  their  mistakes  as  contagious, 
or  as  difficult  to  rectify,  as  those  of  the  thinking  class.  In 
matters  of  thought  and  opinion,  there  is  no  end  either  to 
the  new  crudities  generated,  or  the  newer  criticisms  by 
which  they  are  extirpated.  New  types  of  thought  sway 
the  successive  ages.  One  school,  or  system,  expels  an- 
other. Nothing  rests,  nothing  gets  a  final  form,  in  which 
it  either  can  or  ought  to  stand.  The  thinking  and 
educated  class  of  minds,  too,  are  less  capable  of  many 
truths,  because  they  are  so  generally  preoccupied,  wit- 
tingly or  unwittingly,  by  a  contrary  fashion,  and  have 
such  an  explicit  faith  in  what  the  learned  world  pretends 
just  then  to  have  settled.  On  which  account,  our 
Saviour  himself  was  obliged  to  seek  his  adherents,  and 
raise  up  his  apostles,  among  the  ingenuous  and  humble 
poor,  saying — I  thank  thee,  0  Father,  Lord  of  heaven 
and  earth,  that  thou  hast  hid  these  things  from  the  wise 
and  prudent,  and  hast  revealed  them  unto  babes.  The 
wise  and  prudent  knew  so  much,  as  even  to  be  incapable 
of  faith  in  him;  and  if  there  had  been  no  other  class 
but  these  learned  gentlemen,  these  thinking  men  of  their 
time,  he  would  scarcely  have  left  a  follower.  But  the 
fishermen,  the  babes  of  poverty,  were  less  preoccupied, 
and  capable  of  better  things.  And  for  just  this  reason, 
abating  their  greater  exposure  to  fantastic  and  extrava- 

40 


470  OPINIONS    OF    THINKING    MEN 

gant  delusions,  it  will  be  found,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  that 
the  gospel  of  Christ  has  been  more  genuinely  and 
evenly  held,  among  this  class,  than  it  has  among  the 
professors  and  learned  disciples.  They  testify  one  faith, 
and  live  one  common  life  of  grace,  in  all  ages. 

In  view  of  considerations  like  these,  how  much  does  it 
signify,  that  the  thinking  men  of  our  time  are  so  ready 
to  pronounce  on  the  incredibility,  or  even  inadmissibility, 
of  the  supernatural  facts  just  referred  to?  Nothing,  it 
may  be,  but  simply  this ;  that  the  human  mind,  as  edu- 
cated mind,  is  just  now  at  the  point  of  religious  apogee; 
where  it  is  occupied,  or  preoccupied  by  nature,  and  can  not 
think  it  rational  to  suppose  that  God  does  any  thing 
longer,  which  exceeds  the  causalities  of  nature.  Is  there, 
in  this,  any  proper  ground  of  assurance,  that,  within  fifty 
years  from  this  time,  it  will  not  be  set  in  a  position  to  re- 
gard the  faith  of  supernatural  facts,  as  being  even  neces- 
sary to  the  rationality,  and  the  complete  system  of  the 
universe?  If,  as  I  have  shown,  by  the  argument  here  con- 
structed, we  act  supernaturally  ourselves,  and  if  the  fact 
of  sin  supposes  a  higher  ground  of  unity  in  God's  plan 
than  is  comprehended  in  mere  nature,  what  less  ought  we 
to  expect,  than  that,  when  the  thinking  mind  of  the  world 
has  finally  worn  a  way  through  nature,  ceasing  to  be  ham- 
pered and  shut  in  by  it  as  now,  it  will  strike  into  a  broad- 
er field,  and  be  as  ready  to  believe  these  supernatural 
facts,  as  it  is  at  present  to  reject  them  ?  Indeed,  there  is 
a  kind  of  law  in  skepticism  itself,  that  must  finally  bring 
it  back  from  its  denial  of  a  supernatural  revelation,  to  a 
hearty  and  hungry  embrace  of  it ;  for,  no  longer  staggered 
by  the  supposition,  as  thousands  now  are,  that  the  scrip- 
tures represent  a  dispensation  gone  by,  which  is  hence- 


HAVE    LITTLE    AUTHORITY    HERE.  471 

.  forth  incredible,  it  will  finally  discover  that  they  may  be 
rationally  believed,  for  just  the  reason  that  God  is  doing 
similar  wonders  now.  And  as  certainly  as  no  human  soul 
can  rest  in  mere  negation,  or,  what  is  no  better,  in  nature 
as  the  only  medium  and  symbol  of  religion,  this  discovery 
will  be  made.  There  are,  in  fact,  two  roads  into  this  faith, 
the  direct  road,  and  the  indirect  or  round  about  road  of 
doubt  and  denial.  One  is  taken  by  the  humble,  godly 
souls,  whose  only  want  it  is  to  find  their  Lord,  and  walk 
with  him ;  these  go  straight  in,  to  his  seat,  know  him  in 
his  private  testimony,  and  the  glorious  induement  of  his 
power.  The  others,  wanting  only  to  find  him  scientifi- 
cally, begin  at  nature,  jealous  of  all  but  nature.  They 
go  round  and  round  their  idol,  looking  to  find  a  Creator, 
and  Christianity,  and  a  present  living  God,  in  it,  and,  after 
they  have  torn  their  feet  long  enough,  in  beating  through 
the  briars  of  scientific  reason,  they  will  finally  come  in, 
as  laggards,  weary  and  sore,  and  join  themselves  to  the 
little  ones  of  faith,  saying  truly,  "this,  after  all,  is  rea- 
son; to  believe  the  scriptures,  just  because  the  God 
of  the  scriptures  is  the  God  of  to-day;  as  conversable 
now  as  ever,  working  as  mightily,  redeeming  as  glori- 
ously ;  to  believe  in  the  supernatural,  too,  because  we  be- 
lieve in  nature ;  which,  without  and  apart  from  this  neces- 
sary complement,  were  only  a  worthless  abortion,  a  frac- 
tion whose  integer  is  lost." 

It  is  also  a  matter  worthy  of  particular  note,  when  we 
are  falling  into  the  impression,  that  a  verdict  of  the  think- 
ing men  of  our  time,  is  entitled  to  authority  on  such  a 
question  as  this,  that  we  have  so  many  characters  in 
history  which  they  can  no  way  interpret,  and  which  are 
in  fact  impossible  to  exist,  under  their  theory.  How 


472  THEY    MAKE    NO    GOOD    ACCOUNT 

awkwardly  do  they  handle  such  characters,  and  how 
poorly  do  they  get  on  in  their  attempts  to  solve,  or  even 
to  conceive  them.  Joan  of  Arc,  for  instance — who  has 
not  observed  the  strange  figure  of  imbecility  made  by 
the  modern  school  of  literary  unbelief,  in  the  attempt  to 
find  a  place  for  any  such  character?  They  can  do  nothing 
with  her.  In  their  view,  she  is  impossible.  And  yet  she 
has  a  place  in  history,  aijid  enters  into  the  public  life  of 
the  French  nation,  as  a  determining  cause  of  great  events, 
in  the  same  manner  as  Charlemagne,  or  any  celebrated 
commander.  She  is  a  phenomenon,  for  which  naturalism 
has  no  account,  and  which,  under  that  kind  of  philosophy, 
had  no  right  to  happen.  It  can  say  that  she  was  a  prod- 
igy of  straw  got  up  by  the  leaders,  who  sought  in  that 
manner  to  retrieve  the  desperate  state  of  their  cause ;  or, 
that  she  was  insane ;  or  that  she  was  romantic ;  or  that 
she  was  a  nervous  and  flighty  girl,  doing  she  scarce  knew 
what ;  or,  finally,  that  she  is  a  myth,  and  no  real  person- 
age. And  yet  the  history  laughs  at  all  such  wisdom, 
showing  us  a  character  real  and  true,  that  refuses  to  be 
explained  by  any  such  feeble  inventions  in  the  plane  of 
nature,  and  can  be  nowise  comprehended  in  that  manner. 
She  begins  to  be  intelligible  only  when  she  is  classed  with 
Deborah,  as  a  chieftain  called  out  from  the  retirement  of 
her  sex,  by  the  election  of  God,  and  prepared,  supernatu- 
rally,  in  the  place  of  secret  vision. 

The  same  thing,  in  general,  may  be  said  of  the  inter- 
preters of  Cromwell.  Nothing  can  be  made  of  him  as  a 
mere  natural  man.  Hume  and  Clarendon  call  him  a  re- 
ligious hypocrite;  as  if  a  hypocrite  could  be  a  hero! 
Lamartine,  simply  because  he  believes  in  a  light  which  is 
not  church  light,  calls  him  a  fanatic.  Carlyle  is  wiser, 


OF    KNOWN    HISTOBIC    CHABACTERS.        473 

and,  as  far  as  possible,  contrives  to  let  him  report  himself; 
but  as  soon  as  he  chances  to  loosen  his  own  self-retention, 
for  a  moment,  and  let  us  see  the  man  through  his  panthe- 
istic glasses,  a  strange  letting  down  will  be  observed,  how- 
ever slight  or  casual  the  glimpse  taken — it  is  Cromwell  by 
moonlight,  and  not  the  real  hero.  He  ceases  to  be  in- 
spired, and  begins  to  phosphoresce.  He  is  no  more  a 
battle-axe,  swung  by  the  Lord  Almighty,  but  one  that  lays 
on  automatically,  with  force  enough  to  make  us  think 
that  he  is.  He  is  great  in  his  faith,  only  it  turns  out  that 
his  faith,  meeting  no  real  object,  is,  though  he  thinks  it 
not,  a  merely  subjective  impulse.  Known  to  be  a  stout 
predestinariau,  he  is  fitly  shown  to  be  a  thunder 
shock  in  battle,  as  by  the  momentum  of  God's  eternal 
will  in  his  person ;  only  it  is  recollected  that  predestina- 
tion, by  God,  is  more  philosophically  phrased  by  the 
single  word  destiny ;  a  force  without  will,  or  counsel,  or 
end.  He  is  great  in  power,  therefore  invincible,  irresisti- 
ble, as  being  set  on  by  the  universal  Nobody.  Is  this 
Cromwell?  No  genuine  Cromwell  is  found,  till  he  is 
shown  by  the  side  of  Moses,  a  man  who  takes  power  as  a 
burden  set  upon  him  by  God,  and  wields  it  only  the  more 
sternly  and  faithfully,  as  power;  a  man  "not  eloquent," 
but  "slow  of  speech,"  corning  down  out  of  the  mount, 
where  God  has  taught  him,  to  be  the  leader,  liberator, 
and  lawgiver  of  his  people.  This  is  the  view  of  Crom- 
well toward  which  historic  criticism  runs  more  and  more 
distinctly,  and  when,  at  some  future  day,  our  literature 
has  gotten  over  the  shallows  of  naturalism,  and  dares  to 
speak  of  faith,  this  will  be  the  Cromwell  shown.  He 
may  not  be  counted  a  man  equal  to  Moses,  but  all  that  is 
most  distinctive  and  greatest  in  his  life  will  as  certainly 

40* 


4:74  SUCH    FACTS    ABE    ABUNDANT 

be  referred  to  a  supernatural  and  divine  movement  in 
him. 

And  how  many  characters  are  there  in  the  history  of 
our  modern  world,  who  can  as  little  be  conceived  on  the 
footing  of  mere  nature,  as  these.  Savonarola,  the  ' '  fanatic" 
of  history,  will  emerge,  not  unlikely,  clad  in  the  honors 
of  a  prophet.  So  of  Columbus,  Fenelon,  Fox,  Franke,  and 
a  thousand  others,  who  walked,  consciously  or  uncon- 
sciously, by  a  supernatural  instigation — they  were  nothing, 
it  will  be  seen,  save  by  the  secret  inspiration  that  bore 
them  on.  And  how  many  of  God's  little  ones,  living  and 
dying  in  obscurity,  have  yet  done  as  great  wonders  in 
His  name,  as  if  they  had  been  teachers  and  heroes. 

But  why  is  it,  some  will  ask,  that  we  have  only  to  hear 
of  these  things,  and  do  not  see  them?  Why  must  we 
know  them  only  through  a  degree  of  distance  that  takes 
away  knowledge?  But  the  truth  is  not  exactly  so.  We 
come  a  great  deal  closer  to  them  than  we  think.  Having 
had  this  great  question  of  supernatural  fact  upon  my 
hands  now  for  a  number  of  years,  in  a  determination  also 
to  be  concluded  by  no  mere  conventionalities,  to  observe, 
inquire,  listen,  and  judge,  I  have  been  surprised  to  find 
how  many  things  were  coming  to  my  knowledge  and 
acquaintance,  that  most  persons  take  it  for  granted  are 
utterly  incredible,  except  in  what  they  call  the  age  of 
miracles  and  apostolic  gifts ;  that  is,  in  the  first  three  cen- 
turies of  the  church.  Indeed,  they  are  become  so  famil- 
iar, after  only  a  few  years  of  attention  thus  directed,  and 
without  inquiring  after  them,  that  their  unfamiliar  and 
strange  look  is  gone ;  they  even  appear  to  belong,  more  or 
less  commonly,  to  the  church  and  the  general  economy  of 
the  Spirit. 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIMES.  475 

I  will  instance,  first  of  all,  a  case  not  so  clearly  re- 
ligious, but  explicable  in  no  way,  by  the  mere  causalities 
of  nature.  As  I  sat  by  the  fire,  one  stormy  November 
night,  in  a  hotel  parlor,  in  the  Napa  Valley  of  California, 
there  came  in  a  most  venerable  and  benignant  looking 
person,  with  his  wife,  taking  their  seats  in  the  circle. 
The  stranger,  as  I  afterward  learned,  was  Captain  Yonnt, 
a  man  who  came  over  into  California,  as  a  trapper,  more 
than  forty  years  ago.  Here  he  has  lived,  apart  from  the 
great  world  and  its  questions,  acquiring  an  immense  landed 
estate,  and  becoming  a  kind  of  acknowledged  patriarch 
in  the  country.  His  tall,  manly  person,  and  his  gracious, 
paternal  look,  as  totally  unsophisticated  in  the  expression, 
as  if  he  had  never  heard  of  a  philosophic  doubt  or  ques- 
tion in  his  life,  marked  him  as  the  true  patriarch.  The 
conversation  turned,  I  know  not  how,  on  spiritism  and 
the  modern  necromancy,  and  he  discovered  a  degree  of 
inclination  to  believe  in  the  reported  mysteries.  His 
wife,  a  much  younger  and  apparently  Christian  person, 
intimated  that  probably  he  was  predisposed  to  this  kind 
of  faith,  by  a  very  peculiar  experience  of  his  own,  and 
evidently  desired  that  he  might  be  drawn  out  by  some 
intelligent  discussion  of  his  queries. 

At  my  request,  he  gave  me  his  story.  About  six  or 
seven  years  previous,  in  a  mid- winter's  night,  he  had  a 
dream,  in  which  he  saw  what  appeared  to  be  a  company  of 
emigrants,  arrested  by  the  snows  of  the  mountains,  and 
perishing  rapidly  by  cold  and  hunger.  He  noted  the  very 
cast  of  the  scenery,  marked  by  a  huge  perpendicular  front 
of  white  rock  cliff;  he  saw  the  men  cutting  off  what  ap- 
peared to  be  tree  tops,  rising  out  of  deep  gulfs  of  snow ; 
he  distinguished  the  very  features  of  the  persons,  and  the 


476  SUCH    FACTS    ARE    ABUNDANT 

look  of  their  particular  distress.  He  woke,  profoundly 
impressed  with  the  distinctness  and  apparent  reality  of  his 
dream.  At  length  he  fell  asleep,  and  dreamed  exactly  the 
same  dream  again.  In  the  morning  he  could  not  expel 
it  from  his  mind.  Falling  in,  shortly,  with  an  old  hunter 
comrade,  he  told  him  the  story,  and  was  only  the  more 
deeply  impressed,  by  his  recognizing,  without  hesitation, 
the  scenery  of  the  dream.  This  comrade  came  over  the 
Sierra,  by  the  Carson  Valley  Pass,  and  declared  that  a  spot 
in  the  pass  answered  exactly  to  his  description.  By  this, 
the  unsophisticated  patriarch  was  decided.  He  immedi- 
ately collected  a  company  of  men,  with  mules  and  blank- 
ets, and  all  necessary  provisions.  The  neighbors  were 
laughing,  meantime,  at  his  credulity.  "  No  matter,"  said 
he,  "I  am  able  to  do  this,  and  I  will,  for  I  verily  believe 
that  the  fact  is  according  to  my  dream."  The  men  were 
sent  into  the  mountains,  one  hundred  and  fifty  miles  dis- 
tant, directly  to  the  Carson  Valley  Pass.  And  there  they 
found  the  company,  in  exactly  the  condition  of  the  dream, 
and  brought  in  the  remnant  alive. 

A  gentleman  present  said,  "  you  need  have  no  doubt 
of  this;  for  we  Californians  all  know  the  facts,  and  the 
names  of  the  families  brought  in,  who  now  look  upon 
our  venerable  friend  as  a  kind  of  saviour.  These  names 
he  gave,  and  the  places  where  they  reside,  and  I  found, 
afterward,  that  the  California  people  were  ready,  every 
where,  to  second  his  testimony. 

Nothing  could  be  more  natural,  than  for  the  good- 
hearted  patriarch  himself  to  add,  that  the  brightest  thing 
in  his  life,  and  that  which  gave  him  greatest  joy,  was  his 
simple  faith  in  that  dream.  I  thought  also  I  could  see  in 
that  joy,  the  glimmer  of  a  true  Christian  love  and  life, 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIMES.  477 

into  which,  unawares  to  himself,  he  had  really  been  en- 
tered by  that  faith.  Let  any  one  attempt  now  to  account 
for  the  coincidences  of  that  dream,  by  mere  natural  causali- 
ties, and  he  will  be  glad  enough  to  ease  his  labor,  by  the 
acknowledgment  of  a  supernatural  Providence. 

I  fell  in  also,  in  that  new  world,  with  a  different 
and  more  directly  Christian  example,  in  the  case  of  an 
acquaintance,  whom  I  had  known  for  the  last  twenty 
years;  an  educated  man,  in  successful  practice  as  a  physi- 
cian ;  a  man  who  makes  no  affectations  of  piety,  and  puts 
on  no  airs  of  sanctimony;  living  always  in  a  kind  of  jovial 
element,  and  serving  every  body  but  himself.  He  laughs 
at  the  current  incredulity  of  men,  respecting  prayer,  and 
relates  many  instances,  out  of  his  own  experience,  to  show 
— for  that  is  his  doctrine — that  God  will  certainly  hear 
every  man's  prayer,  if  only  he  is  honest  in  it.  Among 
others,  he  gave  the  following: — He  had  hired  his  little 
house,  of  one  room,  in  a  new  trading  town  that  was  plant- 
ed last  year,  agreeing  to  give  a  rent  for  it  of  ten  dollars 
per  month.  At  length,  on  the  day  preceding  the  rent  day, 
he  found  that  he  had  nothing  in  hand  to  meet  the  pay- 
ment, and  could  not  see  at  all  whence  the  money  was  to 
come.  Consulting  with  his  wife,  they  agreed  that  prayer, 
so  often  tried,  was  their  only  hope.  They  went,  accord- 
ingly to  prayer,  and  found  assurance  that  their  want  should 
be  supplied.  That  was  the  end  of  their  trouble,  and  there 
they  rested,  dismissing  farther  concern.  But  the  morning 
came,  and  the  money  did  not.  The  rent  owner  made  his 
appearance  earlier  than  usual.  As  he  entered  the  door, 
their  hearts  began  to  sink,  whispering  that  now,  for 
once,  they  must  give  it  up,  and  allow  that  prayer  had 
failed.  But,  before  the  demand  was  made,  a  neighbor 


478  SUCH    FACTS    ARE    ABUNDANT 

coming  in,  called  out  the  untimely  visitor,  engaging  him 
in  conversation,  a  few  minutes,  at  the  door.  Meantime  a 

stranger  came  in,  saying,  "Dr. 1  owe  you  ten  dollars, 

for  attending  me  in  a  fever,  at  such  a  time,  and  here  is  the 
money."  He  could  muster  no  recollection,  either  of  the 
man  or  of  the  service,  but  was  willing  to  be  convinced,  and 
so  had  the  money  in  hand,  after  all,  when  the  demand  was 
made.  When  Stilling  and  Franke  recite  their  multitudes 
of  specific  answers  to  prayer,  their  reports  are  very  hast- 
ily discredited  by  many,  because  of  their  strangeness. 
But  I  have  heard  so  many  examples,  personally,  of  the 
kind  just  cited,  that  I  begin  to  think  they  are  even  com- 
mon. 

Nothing  is  farther  off  from  the  Christian  expectation 
of  our  New  England  communities,  than  the  gift  of  tongues. 
So  distant  is  their  practical  habit  from  any  belief  in  the 
possible  occurrence,  that  not  even  the  question  occurs  to 
their  thought.  And  yet,  a  very  near  Christian  friend,  intel- 
ligent in  the  highest  degree,  and  perfectly  reliable  to  me 
as  my  right  hand,  who  was  present  at  a  rather  private, 
social  gathering  of  Christian  disciples,  assembled  to  con- 
verse and  pray  together,  as  in  reference  to  some  of  the 
higher  possibilities  of  Christian  sanctification,  relates  that, 
after  one  of  the  brethren  had  been  speaking,  in  a  strain 
of  discouraging  self-accusation,  another  present  shortly 
rose,  with  a  strangely  beaming  look,  and,  fixing  his  eye 
on  the  confessing  brother,  broke  out  in  a  discourse  of 
sounds,  wholly  unintelligible,  though  apparently  a  true 
language,  accompanying  the  utterances  with  a  very  strange 
and  peculiarly  impressive  gesture,  such  as  he  never  made 
at  any  other  time ;  coming  finally  to  a  kind  of  pause, 
and  commencing  again,  as  if  at  the  same  point,  to  go  over 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIMES.  479 

in  English,  with  exactly  the  same  gestures,  what  had  just 
been  said.  It  appeared  to  be  an  interpretation,  and  the 
matter  of  it  was,  a  beautifully  emphatic  utterance  of  the 
great  principle  of  self-renunciation,  by  which  the  desired 
victory  over  self  is  to  be  obtained.  There  had  been  no 
conversation  respecting  gifts  of  any  kind,  and  no  ref- 
erence to  their  possibility.  The  circle  were  astounded 
by  the  demonstration,  not  knowing  what  to  make  of 
it.  The  instinct  of  prudence  threw  them  on  observing 
a  general  silence,  and  it  is  a  curious  fact  that  the  public 

in  H have  never,  to  this  hour,  been  startled  by  so 

much  as  a  rumor  of  the  gift  of  tongues,  neither  has  the 
name  of  the  speaker  been  associated  with  so  much  as  a 
surmise  of  the  real  or  supposed  fact,  by  which  he  would 
be,  perhaps,  unenviably  distinguished.  It  has  been  a 
great  trial  to  him,  it  is  said,  to  submit  himself  to  this 
demonstration ;  which  has  recurred  several  times. 

I  have  heard  also  of  as  many  as  three  distinct  cases  of 
healing  near  at  hand;  one  where  a  father  whose  nearly 
grown-up  daughter,  supposed  to  be  near  to  death,  under 
the  ravages  of  a  brain  fever,  was  permitted,  in  answer 
to  his  prayers,  to  see  her  rise  up  almost  immediately,  and 
the  next  day  walking  forth  completely  well;  one  where  a 
bad  and  dangerous  swelling  was  immediately  cured;  an- 
other where  a  sick  man  was  restored,  when  life  was 
despaired  of  by  his  family. 

In  addition  to  these  more  domestic  examples,  I  became 
acquainted,  about  two  years  ago,  in  a  distant  part  of  the 
world,  with  an  English  gentleman,  whose  faith  in  the  gift 
of  healing  had  been  established  by  his  own  personal  ex- ' 
ercise  of  it.  He  was  a  man  whose  connections  and  culture, 
whose  well-formed,  tall,  and  robust  looking  person,  whose 


480  SUCH    FACTS    ABE    ABUNDANT 

beautifully  simple  and  humble  manners,  and  whose  blame- 
less, universally  respected  life  among  strangers  not  of  the 
same  faith,  and  knowing  him  only  by  his  virtues  and  the 
sacrifices  he  was  making  for  his  opinions,  were  so  many 
conspiring  tokens  winning  him  a  character  of  confidence, 
that  excluded  any  rational  distrust  of  his  representations. 
He  gave  me  a  full  account,  in  manuscript,  of  some  of  the 
cases  in  which  the  healing  power  appeared  to  be  given  him, 
with  liberty  to  use  them,  as  may  best  serve  the  convenience 
of  my  present  subject. 

It  became  a  question  with  him,  soon  after  his  conver- 
sion, whether,  as  he  had  been  healed  spiritually,  he  ought 
not  also  to  expect  and  receive  the  healing  of  his  body  by 
the  same  faith ;  for  he  had  then  been  an  invalid  for  a  long 
time,  with  only  a  slender  hope  of  recovery.  After  a  hard 
struggle  of  mind,  he  was  able,  dismissing  all  his  prescribed 
remedies,  to  throw  himself  on  God,  and  was  immediately 
and  permanently  made  whole. 

At  length,  one  of  his  children,  whom  he  had  with  him, 
away  from  home,  was  taken  ill  with  a  scarlet  fever.  And 
"now  the  question  was,"  I  give  his  own  words,  "what 
was  to  be  done?  The  Lord  had  indeed  healed  my  own 
sicknesses,  but  would  he  heal  my  son?  I  conferred  with 
a  brother  in  the  Lord,  who,  having  no  faith  in  Christ's  heal- 
ing power,  urged  me  to  send  instantly  for  the  doctor,  and 
dispatched  his  groom  on  horseback  to  fetch  him.  Before 
the  doctor  arrived,  my  mind  was  filled  with  revelation  on 
the  subject.  I  saw  that  I  had  fallen  into  a  snare,  by  turn- 
ing away  from  the  Lord's  healing  hand,  to  lean  on  medical 
skill.  I  felt  grievously  condemned  in  my  conscience.  A 
fear  also  fell  on  me,  that  if  I  persevered  in  this  unbeliev- 
ing course,  my  son  would  die,  as  his  eldest  brother  had. 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIMES.  481 

The  symptoms  in  both  were  precisely  similar.  The  doc- 
tor arrived.  My  son,  he  said,  was  suffering  from  a  scarlet 
fever,  and  medicine  should  be  sent  immediately.  While 
he  stood  prescribing,  I  resolved  to  withdraw  the  child,  and 
cast  him  on  the  Lord.  And  when  he  was  gone,  I  called 
the  nurse  and  told  her  to  take  the  child  into  the  nursery 
and  lay  him  on  the  bed.  I  then  fell  on  my  knees  confess- 
ing the  sin  I  had  committed  against  the  Lord's  healing 
power.  I  also  prayed  most  earnestly  that  it  would  please 
my  Heavenly  Father  to  forgive  my  sin,  and  to  show  that 
he  forgave  it,  by  causing  the  fever  to  be  rebuked.  I  re- 
ceived a  mighty  conviction  that  my  prayer  was  heard, 
and  I  arose  and  went  to  the  nursery,  at  the  end  of  a  long 
passage,  to  see  what  the  Lord  had  done,  and  on  opening 
the  door,  to  my  astonishment,  the  boy  was  sitting  up  in 
his  bed,  and  on  seeing  me  cried  out,  'I  am  quite  well  and 
want  to  have  my  dinner.'  In  an  hour  he  was  dressed, 
and  well,  and  eating  his  dinner ;  and  when  the  physic  ar- 
rived it  was  cast  out  of  the  window.  Next  morning  the 
doctor  returned,  and  on  meeting  me  at  the  garden  gate, 
he  said,  'I  hope  your  son  is  no  worse!'  'He  is  very  well, 
I  thank  you,'  said  I,  in  reply.  'What  can  you  mean,'  re- 
joined the  doctor.  'I  will  tell  you,  come  in  and  sit  down.' 
I  then  told  him  all  that  had  occurred,  at  which  he  fairly 
gasped  with  surprise.  'May  I  see  your  son,'  he  asked. 
'Certainly,  doctor,  but  I  see  that  you  do  not  believe.'  We 
proceeded  up  stairs,  and  my  son  was  playing  with  his 
brother,  on  the  floor.  The  doctor  felt  his  pulse  and  said, 
'Yes,  the  fever  is  gone.'  Finding  also  a  fine,  healthy 
surface  on  his  tongue,  he  added,  'Yes,  he,  is  quite  well,  I 
suppose  it  was  the  crisis  of  his  disease!'" 

Another  of  the  cases  which  he  reports,  shows  more  fully 

41 


482  SUCH    FACTS    ABE    ABUNDANT 

the  working  of  his  own  mind,  on  the  instant  of  healing. 
It  was  the  case  of  a  poor  man's  child,  who  had  heard 
him  advocate  the  faith  of  healing,  and,  now  that  the  phy- 
sician, after  attending  him  for  many  months  of  illness, 
had  given  the  little  patient  up,  saying  that  he  could  do  no 
more,  the  parents  sent  for  him,  in  their  extremity,  to 
come  and  heal  their  son.  He  replied  to  the  father,  "My 
dear  friend,  I  can  not  heal  your  son,  I  can  do  nothing  to 
help  him.  All  that  I  can  do  is  to  ask  you  to  kneel  down 
and  pray  with  me,  to  Christ,  that  we  may  know  what  is 
his  will  in  thi  s  matter. "  "He  immediately  knelt  down  with 
me,"  and,  the  written  account  continues,  "my  prayer  was  a 
reminding  of  the  Lord  Jesus  Christ  of  his  mercy  to  the 
sick,  when  he  was  on  the  earth,  and  that  he  never  sent 
any  sick  away,  unhealed.  I  then  presented  the  petition 
of  the  father  and  mother,  that  their  son  might  be  healed, 
and  besought  the  Lord  to  show  what  his  will  was  in  the 
case.  Whilst  I  was  making  the  supplication,  it  was  re- 
vealed to  me,  through  the  Holy  Spirit,  that  I  was  to  lay 
hands  on  the  boy,  and  receiving,  at  the  time,  great  faith  to 
do  so,  I  arose  and,  not  wishing  to  be  observed  by  the  fa- 
ther, I  laid  my  hand  on  the  lad's  head,  and  said  in  a  low 
tone  of  voice — 'I  lay  my  hand  on  thee  in  the  name  of 
Jesus  Christ.'  In  an  instant  I  saw  color  rush  into  his 
pale  cheeks,  and  it  seemed  as  if  a  glow  of  health  was  giv- 
en, insomuch  that  I  said  involuntarily,  'I  think  your  son 
will  recover.'  I  then  hastily  left  the  room.  In  less  than 
an  hour,  the  mother  came  to  my  house  and  insisted  on 
seeing  me,  to  tell  me  the  wonderful  things  that  had  hap- 
pened to  her  son.  The  result  was  that  the  boy  was  about 
the  next  day." 

The  other  cases  narrated  by  him.  are  scarcely  less  re- 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIMES.  483 

markable.  At  the  same  time,  he  admits,  with  character- 
istic ingenuousness,  that  no  such  gift  has  been  vouchsafed 
him  now,  for  a  number  of  years,  and  that  most  of  the  ex- 
pectations he  had  in  connection  with  the  apostolic  wonder, 
thus  restored,  have  been  disappointed.  What  God's  design 
was,  in  the  gift  thus  temporarily  bestowed,  is  a  profound 
myst  Try  to  him,  and  he  submits  himself  calmly  in  it  to  the 
better,  though  inscrutable  wisdom  of  God.  Probably 
enough,  the  reason  of  his  gift  was  exhausted  in  affording, 
to  these  truths  of  faith,  that  evidence  which  is  necessary 
to  their  just  equilibrium. 

I  have  hesitated  much  whether  to  speak  of  a  case  that, 
in  all  its  varied  stages,  has  been  under  my  own  personal 
inspection,  and  I  am  decided  by  the  consideration  that, 
while  it  shows  no  healing,  by  a  gift,  it  does  show,  only  the 
more  convincingly,  a  supernatural  grace  of  healing  entered 
into  the  faith  of  the  subject  herself.  She  is  an  intelligent, 
well-educated  young  woman,  of  a  more  than  commonly 
strong  and  somewhat  restive  natural  temperament,  the 
daughter  of  a  Christian  man,  living  in  rather  depressed  cir- 
cumstances, but  profoundly  respected  for  his  character. 
Eleven  years  ago  this  daughter,  who  before  had  begun  to 
show  symptoms  of  disease,  in  a  considerable  distortion  of  the 
spine,  became  a  great  sufferer  in  the  still  worse  complica- 
tions of  a  hip  disease.  I  have  never  looked  on  such 
scenes  of  distress  in  any  other  case,  and  hope  I  may  never 
witness  such  again.  Several  times  she  was  given  up  by 
her  physicians,  and  her  death  was  expected  daily;  I 
should  hardly  tell  the  whole  truth,  if  I  did  not  say,  longed 
for,  even  more  constantly.  After  about  two  years,  how- 
ever, her  disease  took  a  more  quiet  shape,  and  the  suffer- 
ing was  greatly  diminished.  Thus  she  lay  for  nine  long 


484  SUCH    FACTS    ABE    ABUNDANT 

years  of  helplessness,  with  both  feet  drawn  up  under  her, 
and  one  of  them  so  close  that  it  was  difficult  to  get  in  a 
thickness  of  cloth  under  the  knee,  to  prevent  inflamma- 
tion. The  physicians  agreed  that  there  was  nothing 
more  to  be  done,  and  that  she  must  wait  her  time;  which, 
after  a  while,  she  had  learned  to  do,  with  the  sweetest  pa- 
tience and  equanimity.  Every  impulse  in  her  restive  na- 
ture was  now  tamed  to  God's  will,  and  she  blessed  the 
hand  which  was  pressing  her  so  close  to  the  divine  friend- 
ship. If  inquired  of,  at  any  time,  whether  she  would  like 
to  get  well,  she  uniformly  answered,  "No;"  adding  that 
she  was  afraid  she  might  not  stand  fast,  but  might  turn 
away  from  her  fidelity,  in  which  she  was  now  so  pro- 
foundly peaceful  and  happy. 

But  it  occurred  to  her  finally  that,  if  God  could  restore 
her,  he  might  also  keep  her,  and  the  question  arose 
whether  she  ought  not  to  trust  Him.  At  last,  she  was 
beginning  to  think  it  might  be  her  duty  to  believe  in  God's 
healing  as  well  as  keeping,  and  in  that  manner  to  pray. 
Having  some  attack  of  acute  disease,  a  physician  was 
called  in,  and,  after  the  attack  was  quelled,  he  began  to 
give  some  hopeful  answers  to  her  queries  about  the  possi- 
bility of  a  restoration  of  her  limbs.  Shortly  before  this, 
too,  her  father,  who  was  visited  with  a  great  accumulation 
of  trials,  went  through  an  awful  struggle  with  God's  jus- 
tice, rising  up  against  him  in  agonies  of  accusation.  But 
he  was  quelled  and  comforted,  and  filled,  as  the  result, 
with  all  divinest  peace.  And  shortly  after  that,  he  had  a 
dream,  which  presented  his  daughter  as  well,  completely 
healed,  before  him.  But  it  raised  no  expectation,  either 
then  or  afterward,  and  he  does  not  refer  to  it  now  as  hav- 
ing had  any  connection  at  all  with  the  subsequent  facts — 


IN    CUE    OWN    TIMES.  485 

he  does  not  much  confide  in  dreams.  But  his  daughter 
was  beginning  now  to  believe  that  she  might  be  made 
well,  and  really  set  herself  to  it  as  her  settled  faith ;  and 
he  himself  was  allowing,  often,  the  thought  that  possibly 
it  might  somehow  be  otherwise  with  her.  Kennedies  were 
not  discarded,  but  applied  faithfully  and  perseveringly. 
The  problem  was,  how  to  use  natural  causes  with  a 
faith  in  supernatural  helps.  In  a  short  time  the  limbs 
were  brought  down,  one  of  them  to  touch  the  floor,  then 
both,  then  she  stood,  and  next  she  walked.  I  knew  the 
change  that  was  going  on,  but,  not  having  seen  her  for 
some  weeks,  I  was  none  the  less  surprised,  when  walking 
in  a  neighboring  street,  to  see  her  skipping  down  a  high 
flight  of  steps,  with  scarcely  a  perceptible  token  of  lame- 
ness. Ask  her  family  now  what  this  means,  and  by  what 
power  it  has  come  to  pass,  and  they  answer  promptly, 
"by  the  power  of  God."  She  herself  says  the  same,  an- 
swering out  of  her  own  consciousness.  She  believes  that 
her  physician  has  done  well,  and  that  God  sent  him  to  be 
a  minister  to  her  faith,  but  she  declares  that  she  has  all 
the  while  felt  the  vigor  coming  into  her  by  and  through 
her  faith,  and  that,  when  she  first  stood,  she  consciously 
stood  by  a  divine  power,  and  could  no  more  have  stood 
without  the  sense  of  it,  or  the  day  before  it  came,  than 
she  could  have  supported  the  world.  This  protestation 
of  hers  I  feel  bound  to  honor ;  though  very  well  aware 
that  the  case  may  be  turned,  by  saying  that  the  second 
causes  appealed  to  wrought  the  cure.  But  is  it  not  more 
philosophical,  a  great  deal,  to  take  the  inward  testimony 
of  the  subject,  and  see  the  higher  consciousness  of  her 
faith  struggling  with  the  remedies,  and  contributing  a 
force  superior,  in  fact,  to  all  remedies?  Indeed,  I  have  a 

41* 


486  SUCH    FACTS    ARE    ABUNDANT 

peculiar  satisfaction  in  the  facts  of  this  case,  just  because 
the  natural  and  supernatural  are  so  rationally  and  soundly 
combined.  The  problem  of  their  possible  concurrence  is 
evenly  held,  and  there  is  time  enough  occupied,  in  the 
cure,  to  show  a  process.  "  Go  to  the  pool  of  Siloam,  and 
wash  " — even  Christ  himself  used  nature  as  a  means,  to 
provoke  the  necessary  faith,  when  nature  had,  in  fact,  no 
virtue  in  itself. 

I  cite  only  one  more  witness ;  a  man  who  carries  the 
manner  and  supports  the  office  of  a  prophet,  though  with- 
out claiming  the  repute  of  it  himself.  He  is  a  fugitive 
from  slavery,  whose  name  I  had  barely  heard,  but  whose 
character  and  life  have  been  known  to  many  in  our  com- 
munity, for  the  last  twenty  years.  He  called  at  my  door, 
about  the  time  I  was  sketching  the  outline  of  this  chapter, 
requesting  an  interview.  As  I  entered  the  room,  it  was 
quite  evident  that  he  was  struggling  with  a  good  deal  of 
mental  agitation,  though  his  manner  was  firm,  and  even 
dignified.  He  said  immediately,  that  he  had  come  to  me 
"  with  a  message  from  de  Lord."  I  replied,  that  I  was 
glad  if  he  had  any  so  good  thing  as  that  for  me,  and  hoped 
he  would  deliver  it  faithfully.  He  told  me,  in  terms  of 
great  delicacy,  and  with  a  seriousness  that  excluded  all 
appearance  of  a  design  to  win  his  way  by  flattery,  that  he 
had  conceived  the  greatest  personal  interest  in  me,  be- 
cause, in  hearing  me  once  or  twice,  he  had  discovered 
that  God  was  teaching  me,  and  discovering  Himself  to  me 
in  a  way  that  was  specially  hopeful ;  and  that,  for  this 
very  reason,  he  had  been  suffering  the  greatest  personal 
burdens  of  feeling  on  my  account.  For  more  than  a  year 
he  had  been  praying  for  me,  and  sometimes  in  the  night, 
because  of  his  apprehension  that  I  had  made  a  false  step, 


IN    OUE    OWN    TIMES.  487 

.and  been  disobedient  to  the  heavenly  vision.  During  all 
this  time,  he  had  been  struggling  also  with  the  question, 
whether  he  might  come  and  see  me,  and  testify  his  con- 
cern for  me  ?  One  must  be  a  very  poor  Christian,  not  to 
be  deeply  touched  by  such  a  discovery — one  of  the  hum- 
blest of  God's  children,  a  stranger,  trembling  and  watch- 
ing for  him,  in  his  place  of  obscurity,  and  daring,  only 
with  the  greatest  difficulty,  to  come  and  disburden  his 
heart. 

I  asked  him  to  explain,  and  not  to  suffer  any  feeling  of 
constraint.  In  a  manner  of  the  greatest  deference  possi- 
ble, and  with  a  most  singularly  beautiful  skill,  he  went 
on,  gathering  round  his  point,  and  keeping  it  all  the  while 
concealed,  as  he  was  nearing  it,  straightening  up  his  tall, 
manly  form,  dropping  out  his  Africanisms,  rising  in  the 
port  of  his  language,  beaming  with  a  look  of  intelligence 
and  spiritual  beauty,  all  in  a  manner  to  second  his  pro- 
phetic formulas — "The  Lord  said  to  me  "  thus  and  thus; 
"  The  Lord  has  sent  me  to  say ;"  till  I  also,  as  I  gazed 
upon  him,  was  obliged  internally  to  confess,  "verily, 
Nathan  the  prophet  has  come  again!"  It  was  really  a 
scene  such  as  any  painter  might  look  a  long  time  to  find — 
such  dignity  in  one  so  humble ;  expression  so  lofty,  and 
yet  so  gentle  and  respectful ;  the  air  of  a  prophet  so  com- 
manding and  positive,  and  yet  in  such  divine  authority, 
as  to  allow  no  sense  of  forwardness  or  presumption. 

It  came  out,  finally,  as  the  burden  of  the  message,  that 
on  a  certain  occasion,  and  in  reference  to  a  certain  public 
matter,  I  had  undertaken  that  which  could  not  but  with- 
draw me  from  God's  teaching,  and  was  certain  to  obscure 
the  revelations  otherwise  ready  and  waiting  to  be  made. 
"Yes,"  I  replied,  "but  there  was  nothing  wrong  in  what 


488  SUCH    FACTS    ARE    ABUNDANT 

I  undertook  to  set  forward.  It  brought  no  scandal  on 
religion.  It  concerned,  you  will  admit,  the  real  benefit 
of  the  public,  in  all  future  times."  "Ah,  yes,"  he  an- 
swered, "it  was  well  enough  to  be  done,  but  it  was  not 
for  you.  God  had  other  and  better  things  for  you.  He 
was  calling  you  to  Himself,  and  it  was  yours  to  go  with 
Him,  not  to  be  laboring  in  things  more  properly  belong- 
ing to  other  men."  I  had  given  him  the  plea,  by  which, 
drawing  on  my  natural  judgment,  I  had  justified  myself 
in  going  into  the  engagement  in  question.  Indeed,  to 
have  had  any  scruple  on  this  account,  I  have  no  doubt, 
would  be  commonly  considered,  by  intelligent  persons,  to  be 
even  a  weakness.  And  yet,  I  am  obliged  to  confess  to  a 
strong,  and  even  prevalent  impression,  that  my  humble 
brother  was  right.  For  the  real  stress  of  his  message  lay, 
not  so  much  in  the  particular  instance  referred  to,  as  in 
that  more  general  infirmity  or  mistake,  which  the  instance 
might  be  used  to  represent ;  viz.,  the  tendency  of  every 
most  earnest  soul  to  be  diverted  from  its  aims,  by  things 
external.  His  spiritual  perceptions  were  deep  enough  to 
lay  hold  of  a  general  infirmity,  which  was  only  the  more 
impressively  corrected  by  a  particular  example,  'and,  in 
this  manner,  his  piercing  words  of  love  were  answered  by 
the  settled  assent  of  my  Christian  consciousness. 

I  thanked  him  for  his  message,  and  even  looked  upon 
him  with  a  kind  of  reverence  as  we  parted.  I  found,  on 
inquiry,  that  he  was  a  man  without  blame,  industrious, 
pure,  a  husband  and  father,  faithful  to  his  office,  and 
always  in  the  same  high  key  of  Christian  living.  But 
the  people  of  his  color,  knowing  him  well,  and  having 
nothing  to  say  against  him,  could  yet  offer  no  opinion  at 
all  concerning  him.  He  was  plainly  enough  a  strange 


IN    OUR    OWN    TIMES.  489 

being  to  them ;  they  could  make  nothing  of  him.  The 
most  they  could  say  was,  that  he  is  always  the  same. 

I  have  since  visited  him,  in  his  little  shop,  and  drawn 
out  of  him  the  story  of  his  life.  He  became  a  Christian 
about  the  time  of  his  arrival  at  manhood,  and  gives  a  very 
clear  and  beautiful  account  of  his  conversion.  And  the 
Lord,  he  says,  told  him,  at  that  time,  that  he  should  be 
free,  soul  and  body.  To  which  he  answered,  "Yea  Lord, 
I  know  it."  A  promise  that  was  afterward  fulfilled  in  a 
very  strange  and  wonderful  deliverance.  I  observed  that, 
in  the  account  he  gave  me,  he  was  continually  saying,  in 
the  manner  of  the  prophets,  "the  Lord  said,"  and  "the 
Lord  commanded,"  and  "the  Lord  promised,  "and  I  called 
his  attention  to  the  fact,  asking — what  do  you  mean 
by  this?  Do  you  hear  words  audibly  spoken?  "Oh 
no."  "What  then?  Do  you  think  what  appears  to 
be  said  to  you,  and  call  that  the  saying  of  the 
Lord?"  "Yes,  I  think  it— but  that  is  not  all."  "How 

then  do  you  know  that  it  is  any  thing  more  than 's 

thought?"  "Well,  I  know  it,  I  feel  it  to  be  not  from  me, 
and  I  can  tell  you  things  that  show  it  to  be  so ;"  reciting 
facts,  which,  if  they  are  true,  prove  beyond  a  question 
the  certainty  of  some  illumination  not  of  himself.  "Why 
then,"  I  asked,  "does  God  teach  you  in  this  manner  and 
not  me  ?  I  feel  a  strong  conviction,  sometimes,  that  I  am 
in  the  will,  I  know  not  how,  and  the  directing  counsel  of 
God,  but  I  could  never  say,  as  you  do,  'the  Lord  said 
thus  to  me.' "  "Ah,"  said  he,  "but  you  have  the  means — 
you  can  read  as  I  can  not,  you  have  great  learning.  But 
I  am  a  poor,  ignorant  child,  and  God  does  with  me  just 
as  he  can."  Whatever  may  be  thought  of  his  revelations, 
none,  I  think,  will  deny  him,  in  his  reply,  the  credit  of  a 


490  AND    STILL    Wd    ABE    SLOW 

true  philosophy.  What  can  be  worthier  of  God  than  to 
be  the  guide  of  this  faithful,  and  otherwise  dejected  man, 
making  up  for  his  privations  of  ignorance,  by  the  fuller 
and  more  open  vision  of  Himself? 

And  yet  I  should  leave  a  wrong  impression,  were 
I  not  to  say,  that  this  Christian  fugitive,  this  un- 
lettered body  servant,  now,  of  Christ,  as  once  of  his 
earthly  master,  is  deep  in  the  wisdom  of  the  scriptures, 
quotes  them  continually  with  a  remarkable  eloquence 
and  propriety,  and  with  a  degree  of  insight  which 
many  of  the  best  educated  preachers  might  envy. 
He  also  believes  that  God  has  healed  the  sick,  in 
many  instances,  in  immediate  connection  with  his 
prayers,  giving  the  names  and  particulars  without 
scruple. 

Such  now  are  the  kinds  of  religious  exercises  and 
demonstrations  that  are  still  extant,  even  in  our  own  time, 
in  certain  walks  of  society.  In  that  humbler  stratum  of 
life,  where  the  conventionalities  and  carnal  judgments  of 
the  world  have  less  power,  there  are  characters  blooming 
in  the  holiest  type  of  Christian  love  and  beauty,  who  talk, 
and  pray,  and,  as  they  think,  operate  apostolically,  as  if 
God  were  all  to  them  that  he  ever  was  to  the  church,  in 
the  days  of  her  primitive  grace.  And  it  is  much  to  know 
that,  while  the  higher  tiers  of  the  wise  and  prudent  are 
assuming,  so  confidently,  the  absolute  discontinuance  of 
all  apostolic  gifts,  there  are  yet,  in  every  age,  great  num- 
bers of  godly  souls,  and  especially  in  the  lower  ranges  of 
life,  to  whom  the  conventionalities  of  opinion  are  nothing, 
and  the  walk  with  God  every  thing,  who  dare  to  claim  an 
open  state  with  Him ;  to  pray  with  the  same  expectation, 
and  to  speak  of  faith  in  the  same  manner,  as  if  they  had 


TO    BELIEVE    WHAT    IS    CREDIBLE.  491 

lived  in  the  apostolic  times.  And  they  are  not  the  noisy, 
violent  class,  who  delight  in  the  bodily  exercises  that 
profit  little,  mistaking  the  fumes  of  passion  for  the  reve- 
lations of  God,  but  they  are,  for  the  most  part,  such  as 
walk  in  silence,  and  dwell  in  the  shades  of  obscurity. 
And  that  man  has  lived  to  little  purpose,  who  has  not 
learned  that  what  the  great  world  pities,  and  its  teachers 
disallow,  even  though  mixed  with  tokens  of  weakness,  is 
many  times  deepest  in  truth,  and  closest  to  the  real  sub- 
limities of  life  and  religion. 

That  I  may  not  leave  a  wrong  impression,  or  an 
impression  that  is  not  according  to  truth,  I  feel  obliged 
to  add,  in  concluding  this  chapter,  that  I  do  not 
seem  to  be  as  positive  and  full  in  my  faith  on  this 
subject  as  I  ought  to  be,  and  as  my  arguments  them- 
selves may  seem  to  indicate.  As  regards  the  general 
truth  that  supernatural  facts,  such  as  healings,  tongues, 
and  other  gifts  may  as  well  be  manifested  now  as 
at  any  former  time,  and  that  there  has  never  been  a, 
formal  discontinuance,  I  am  perfectly  satisfied.  I  know 
no  proof  to  the  contrary  that  appears  to  me  to  have 
a  straw's  weight.  And  yet,  when  I  come  to  the  ques- 
tion of  being  in  such  gifts,  or  of  receiving  into  easy 
credit  those  who  appear  to  be,  I  acknowledge  that, 
for  some  reason,  either  because  of  some  latent  subjection 
to  the  conventionalities  of  philosophy,  or  to  the  worse 
conventionalities  of  sin,  belief  does  not  follow,  save  in 
a  somewhat  faltering  and  equivocal  way.  Arguments 
for  the  possibility  are  good,  but  evidences  for  the  fact  do 
not  correspond.  But  there  is  nothing  peculiar  in  this ;  it 
is  even  so  with  many  great  questions  of  God  and  immor- 


492  SLOW    TO    BELIEVE. 

tality.  The  arguments  are  good  and  clear,  but,  for  some 
reason,  they  do  not  make  faith,  and  we  are  still  surprised 
to  find,  in  our  practice,  that  we  only  doubtfully  believe. 
To  believe  these  supernatural  things,  in  the  form  of  par- 
ticular facts,  is  certainly  difficult;  and  how  conscious 
are  we,  as  we  set  ourselves  to  the  questions,  of  the 
weakness  of  our  vacillations!  Pardon  us,  Lord,  that 
when  we  make  so  much  of  mere  credibilities  and  ra- 
tionalities of  opinion,  we  are  yet  so  slow  to  believe, 
that  what  we  have  shown  to  be  credible  and  rational,  is 
actually  coming  to  pass. 


CHAPTER  XV. 

CONCLUSION  STATED.-USES  AND  RESULTS. 

THE  course  of  argument  proposed  in  this  treatise  is  now 
completed.  It  only  remains  to  state,  as  definitely  as  may 
be,  how  far  it  goes,  or  in  what  way  and  degree  it  estab- 
lishes the  main  point  in  issue ;  and  also  to  gather  up  some 
of  the  remote  and  subordinate  results  that  appear  to  be 
involved  in  it. 

It  was  undertaken,  mainly,  to  establish  the  credibility 
and  historic  fact  of  what  is  supernatural  in  the  Christian 
gospels.  The  problem  was,  in  fact,  to  frame  an  argument 
that,  on  one  hand,  will  virtually  settle  the  question  of  a 
mythical  origin  of  the  gospels,  without  going  into  a  direct 
controversy  on  that  footing,  where  the  points  made  are  too 
many  and  loose  to  allow  any  very  decisive  result ;  also  to 
frame  an  argument  that,  avoiding,  on  the  other,  the  issue 
of  infallible  inspiration,  which  involves  insuperable  diffi- 
culties in  the  statement,  will  yet  virtually  gain  all  that  is 
sought  for  the  Christian  revelation  under  that  issue ;  viz., 
a  genuine,  comprehensive  faith  in  its  supernatural  origin 
as  a  gift  of  God  to  man. 

The  argument  presented  turns  principally  on  two  facts; 
viz.,  the  fact  that  we  act  supernaturally  ourselves,  which 
God  and  other  created  spirits  may  as  well  do  as  we;  and 
the  fact  of  sin,  which  is  both  a  fact  of  universal  observa- 
tion and  of  universal  consciousness.  On  the  ground  of 
these  two  facts,  it  has  been  shown,  first,  that  nature  is  not 
the  proper  system  of  God,  but  only  an  inferior,  subordin- 
ate, and  merely  instrumental  part,  and,  in  that  sense,  a  part 

42 


494  THE    ARGUMENT    ESTABLISHES 

complemental  to  the  grand  supernatural  empire,  in  which 
the  real  system  of  God  is  centered ;  secondly,  that  what  is 
commonly  called  nature  is  no  such  integer  of  order  and 
harmony  as  is  commonly  assumed,  but  is,  in  fact,  a  condi- 
tion of  unnature,  being  a  scheme  of  causalities  disordered 
by  sin,  and  set  on  courses  of  retributive  action  that  imply 
perpetual  misdirection;  so  that,  apart  from  a  coeternal 
factor  of  supernatural  redemption,  what  the  naturalists 
regard  as  the  real  totality,  or  system  of  nature,  is  not 
only  become  a  whole  that  groaneth  and  travaileth 
in  pain  together,  but  must  inevitably  continue  to  groan, 
till  relief  and  deliverance  are  brought,  by  some  force  su- 
pernatural that  is  equal  to  the  occasion. 

A  supernatural  work  of  redemption  becomes,  in  this 
view,  a  kind  of  intellectual  necessity;  because  otherwise 
the  integrity  and  real  unity  of  counsel,  in  a  proper  frame 
of  order,  appear  to  be  wanting.  The  strongest  possible 
presumption  is  raised,  in  this  manner,  for  just  such  a  work 
as  Christianity  undertakes  and  declares  to  be  undertaken — 
as  it  should  be — from  before  the  foundation  of  the  world ; 
a  work  that  is  no  afterthought,  but  enters  into  the  origin- 
al unity  of  the  great  scheme  of  existence  itself.  When 
Christ  appears,  therefore,  we  take  up  the  record  of  his  life, 
and  show  that  he  is  not  only  a  supernatural  person,  as  al] 
men  are,  but  a  supernatural  person  in  the  still  higher  de- 
gree of  being  also  superhuman ;  that  he  has  come  into 
our  world  as  not  being  of  it,  that  his  character  can  be  no- 
wise classed  with  human  characters ;  in  short,  that  he  is  a 
living,  self-evidencing  miracle  in  his  person.  Then,  that 
he  should  perform  miracles,  is  scarcely  less  than  a  neces- 
sary consequence.  We  also  show  that  Christianity,  as  a 
plan  of  supernatural  grace,  contains  hidden  marks  of 


THE    VERITY    OF    THE    GOSPELS.  495 

verity,  which  only  appear,  when  it  is  held  up  in  a  light  to 
show  them  and  which,  as  being  latent  in  this  manner, 
could  not  be  of  man.  We  have  also  shown  that  the  world 
itself  is  governed  in  the  interest  of  Christianity,  and  that 
supernatural  facts  are  occurring  now,  or  have  never  been 
finally  discontinued.  It  may  be  too  much  to  claim  that 
we  have  unanswerably  established  the  fact  of  miracles 
performed  in  our  time — it  is  more  exact  to  say,  that  we 
have  shown  the  assumption  of  their  non-performance,  of 
which  so  much  is  made  by  many  critics,  to  be  groundless, 
and  that  their  continuance,  which  may  be  asserted  with 
sufficient  reason,  they  can  no  way  disprove. 

What  now  is  the  precise  bearing  of  all  this  on  the  his- 
toric verity  and  the  supernatural  origin  of  the  gospels,  or 
of  the  Christian  revelation  generally?  As  regards  the 
matter  of  an  exact  verbal  inspiration,  nothing  directly; 
that  is  a  question  waived,  or  kept  out  of  sight;  and  yet 
the  mind  is  brought  to  a  landing  place,  where,  without 
being  perplexed  by  impossible  definitions,  and  strained 
arguments  in  their  behalf,  it  will  acquiesce,  as  it  were, 
naturally,  in  the  fact  of  a  general,  undefined  inspiration, 
having  no  longer  any  quarrel  to  maintain,  because  the 
conditions  of  quarrel  are  taken  away.  The  question  of 
inspired  verity  is  not  left,  by  our  argument,  in  any  such 
position,  as  when  it  is  held  that  the  moral  ideas  and  spirit- 
ual truths  only  of  the  scriptures  are  infallibly  given,  and 
their  historic  matter  left  to  be  disposed  of  as  it  may ;  for 
the  great,  commanding,  principal  facts  are  shown  to  be 
historically  true.  If  any  debate  is  to  be  had,  it  must  be 
regarding  certain  subordinate  and  particular  facts,  that  are 
questioned,  because  of  some  specially  suspicious  indica- 
tions, that  stumble  belief.  And  little  stress  is  likely  to  be 


496  THE    ARGUMENT    ESTABLISHES 

laid  on  these,  because  the  working  plan  of  Christianity,  as 
a  regenerative,  supernatural  grace,  is  now  on  foot  as  a  ver- 
ity already  established;  so  that  the  mind  is  set  on  a  high- 
er plane  of  thought,  than  when  it  only  admits  a  Christian- 
ity qualified,  or  about  to  be  qualified,  down  to  a  mere  doc- 
trine of  nature  and  natural  development,  and  is  prepared, 
in  that  manner,  to  be  stumbled  by  the  smallest  difficulties. 

The  mythical  origin  of  the  gospels  is,  in  this  manner, 
refuted,  without  any  particular  notice  of  its  proofs,  by  a 
process  farther  back  and  more  summary.  To  untwist, 
one  by  one,  its  perverse  ingenuities,  and  wade  through  its 
mires  of  false  learning,  will  be  necessary  to  no  one  who 
has  found  a  Christ  among  men,  impossible  to  be  classed 
with  men ;  doing  his  miracles,  and  erecting,  on  the  earth, 
his  supernatural  kingdom.  Not  even  Dr.  Strauss  would 
ever  have  undertaken  this  kind  of  argument,  if  he  had  not 
first  assumed  the  incredibility  of  any  thing  supernatural ;  in 
which  assumption,  after  all,  the  main  plausibility  of  his 
argument  consists. 

It  is  very  true  that  we  have  not  proved  the  historic  ver- 
ity of  all  the  miracles.  We  have  only  shown  that  Christ 
was  a  miracle  himself,  in  his  own  person,  and  performed 
miracles.  Whether  he  performed  this  or  that  miracle,  ex- 
actly as  related,  may  yet  be  questioned.  Some  of  the  facts 
reported  as  miracles,  looking  only  at  the  form  of  the  lan- 
guage, may  be  otherwise  explained;  as,  for  example,  the 
disturbing  of  the  water  by  .the  angel  in  the  pool  of  Be- 
thesda;  where  it  may  have  been  the  writer's  intention, 
only  to  give  the  current  faith  or  impression  of  the  time. 
If  any  one  chooses  to  deny  the  cursing  of  the  fig-tree,  be- 
cause it  was  an  act  of  ill-nature,  he  can  take  that  low  view 
of  the  transaction ;  only  he  is  likely,  when  confronted  with 


THE    VERITY    OF    THE    GOSPELS  497 

the  suggestion  that  it  was  done,  as  an  eloquent  exhibition 
of  the  great  moral  truth,  that  God  will  blast  every  tree 
that  bears  no  fruit — -a,  truth  which  could  not  be  as  impress- 
ively taught  in  words — to  feel  the  lowness  and  perversity 
of  his  construction  too  sensibly,  to  find  much  comfort  in 
it.  The  miraculous  nativity  of  Jesus  may  be  questioned, 
by  any  one  who  can  see  nothing  in  it  but  an  extravagance 
shocking  to  reason,  or  a  myth,  in  the  semblance  of  narra- 
tive, that  displaces  any  supposition  of  historic  verity  in  the 
fact.  But,  given  the  fact  that  an  incarnation  is  wanted,  that 
Christ  is  declared  to  be  the  Word  incarnate,  and  shown, 
by  his  character,  to  have  come  into  the  world  as  not  being 
of  it,  what  more  can  be  needed  than  to  put  the  objector 
on  the  question,  in  what  other  manner,  a  real  incarna- 
tion of  the  divine  in  the  human  could  be  accomplished, 
that  should  be  as  close  to  human  feeling,  and  as  strictly 
historic,  in  its  introduction,  as  this  of  the  miraculous  na- 
tivity? And  if  the  objector  will  but  let  his  imagination 
rise  to  the  real  pitch  of  the  subject,  it  will  be  strange,  if 
he  does  not  even  begin  to  feel  himself  kindled,  with  Mary, 
in  her  song  of  triumph,  and  accept  the  whole  history,  as 
one  transcendently  beautiful  and  sublime.  In  the  same 
manner,  any  one  is  at  liberty  still,  as  far  as  our  argument 
is  concerned,  to  speak  of  discrepancies  between  the  gos- 
pels, or  between  the  Acts  of  the  Apostles  and  the  Epis- 
tles, but  now  that  Christ,  and  his  miracles,  and  his  super- 
natural kingdom,  are  seen  standing  forth,  as  facts  already 
established,  facts  which  can  not  be  shaken  by  any  mere 
discrepancies  in  the  narrative,  he  is  much  more  like- 
ly to  accept  these  apparent  disagreements,  in  matters  triv- 
ial, as  confirmations  of  the  Christian  truth,  and  use  them  as 
commendations  of  it  to  our  confidence. 

42* 


THE    ARGUMENT    ESTABLISHES 

But  it  may  be  objected,  contrary  to  this,  by  some  over- 
strenuous,  or  overpunctual  believer,  that  our  argument, 
which  stops  short  of  proving  every  thing,  leaves  a  gate 
opened  to  every  sort  of  looseness ;  that,  as  the  issue  is  here 
qualified,  a  war  begun  on  each  particular  fact  will,  finally 
cut  off,  in  detail,  all  that  seemed  to  be  established  in  the 
general ;  so  that  nothing  will,  in  fact,  be  left.  I  think  oth- 
erwise. The  difficulty  never  has  been  to  establish  this  or 
that  miracle,  but  to  establish  any  miracle  at  all,  or  the 
credibility  of  any.  One  miracle  proved,  or  the  credibility 
of  one,  is  virtually  an  end  of  all  debate,  for  the  back  of 
skepticism  is  there  broken.  Besides,  the  argument  we  in- 
stitute puts  the  doubter  in  a  new  and  advanced  position. 
He  has  verified  Christ,  the  grand,  central  wonder,  the  dis- 
order and  fall  of  nature,  the  need  of  a  supernatural  grace 
and  power,  even  to  complete  the  intelligent  unity  of  God's 
plan,  and,  what  is  more,  the  fact  that  he  himself  exists  in  a 
heavenly,  supernatural  kingdom,  where  he  meets,  on  every 
3ide,  the  manifested  love  and  reconciling  grace  of  God. 
The  atmosphere  of  doubt  and  debate  is  already  cleared. 
To  break  loose  now,  on  some  particular  miracle,  or  ques- 
tion of  fact,  is  impossible.  Even  if  he  gain  his  point,  he 
is  the  loser;  for  he  only  mars  the  glory  of  a  faith  that  is 
already  established,  and  spots  with  blemish  the  religion 
that  already  has  a  right  to  his  faith.  He  does  not  break 
Christianity  down,  he  only  makes  it  a  faith  less  welcome 
and  clear.  In  such  a  position,  he  will  naturally  prefer 
to  have  the  gospel  of  his  faith  strong  as  it  may  be; 
holding  always  a  presumption  against  the  suggestions 
of  doubt,  and  allowing  to  all  the  minor  points  of  diffi- 
culty, that  favorable  construction  by  which  they  will  be 
cleared. 


THE    VERITY    OF    THE    GOSPELS.  499 

On  the  whole,  we  seem  to  make  out,  by  our  argument, 
a  vindication  of  the  supernatural  truth  of  the  gospels, 
that  is  not  only  sufficient,  but  practically  complete,  and, 
besides,  one  that  has  many  advantages.  We  go  into  no 
debate  about  the  canon,  which  is  likely  to  issue  in  a  man- 
ner that  is  not  really  convincing ;  we  start  no  claim  of 
verbal  inspiration,  such  as  takes  away  the  confidence  and 
establishes  the  rational  disrespect  of  the  skeptic,  before 
the  argument  is  begun ;  we  sharpen  no  point  of  infalli- 
bility down,  so  as  to  prick  and  fasten  each  particular  iota 
of  the  book,  afterward  to  concede  variations  of  copy, 
defects  of  style,  mistakes  in  numerals,  and  as  many  other 
little  discrepancies  as  we  must.  But  we  try  to  establish, 
by  a  process  that  is  intelligent  and  worthy  of  respect,  the 
historic  outposts,  Christ  and  his  miracles,  and  with  these, 
also,  the  grand  working-plan  of  a  supernatural  grace  and 
salvation.  After  this,  the  mind  will  gravitate,  as  of 
course,  toward  a  general,  inclusive,  comprehensive  faith, 
and  we  shall  find  no  language  that  so  fitly  expresses  our 
conviction,  as  to  say — All  scripture  is  given  by  inspira- 
tion of  God,  and  is  profitable  for  doctrine,  for  reproof,  for 
correction,  for  instruction  in  righteousness. 

Superficially  viewed,  there  is  a  certain  parallelism  be- 
tween this  argument  for  the  supernatural  in  religion,  and 
that  of  Mr.  Parker  and  the  naturalistic  school  generally 
against  it,  and  it  is  possible  that  some  will  be  perverse 
enough  to  accuse  me  of  a  similar  treatment  of  revelation. 
I  will  never  condescend  to  widen,  purposely,  or  for  rea- 
sons politic  and  prudential,  the  distance  between  me  and 
another  who  has  offended  the  Christian  public.  But  it 
may  show  the  method  of  my  argument  more  exactly,  if  I 
sketch  a  brief  comparison — -just  as  I  have  been  referring 


500  HOW    RELATED    TO    THE    METHOD 

heretofore  to  Mr.  Parker,  to  get  light  and  shade  for  my 
subject,  without  raising  any  special  controversy  with  him. 

Mr.  Parker  undertakes  to  frame  a  rational  view  of  re- 
ligion, that  sets  it  on  the  footing  of  nature.  I  have  un- 
dertaken to  frame  a  rational  view  of  religion,  that  com- 
prehends nature  and  the  supernatural,  as  coeternal  factors 
in  the  universal  system  of  God. 

He  maintains  the  complete  universality  of  natural  laws, 
and  refuses  to  believe  in  a  miracle,  because  it  is  a  suspen- 
sion of  the  laws  of  nature.  I  believe,  as  firmly,  in  the 
universality  of  laws,  but  not  of  natural  laws;  maintain- 
ing that  the  human  will  itself  is  regulated  by  no  laws  of 
natural  causality,  and  has  power  even  to  act  upon  the 
lines  of  cause  and  effect  in  nature.  God,  of  course,  may 
do  the  same ;  which,  if  he  do  it,  is  a  miracle.  Not  a  mir- 
acle because  the  laws  of  nature  are  suspended ;  for  they 
are  not,  but  are  only  varied  in  their  action  by  the  inter- 
vention of  a  power  external,  as  when  we  vary  their 
results  ourselves.  Yet  still  there  is  a  law  for  the  inter- 
vention of  God,  viz.,  the  law  of  his  end;  which,  though 
it  be  no  term  of  nature,  but  a  rule  of  intelligence  and 
rational  sovereignty,  would  require  Him  to  perform  the 
same  miracle  again,  a  thousand  times  over,  in  exactly 
the  same  conditions.  To  define  a  miracle,  therefore,  to 
be  a  suspension  of  the  laws  of  nature,  is  irrational  and 
wholly  below  the  subject.  With  Mr.  Parker,  I  believe 
in  no  such  miracle.  And  yet,  in  the  result  of  this  argu- 
ment, I  am  brought  to  accept  all  the  miracles  of  Christ, 
while  he  rejects  them  all. 

Mr.  Parker  takes  up  the  admission,  so  frequently  and 
gratuitously  made,  that  miracles  and  all  supernatural  gifts 
have  been  discontinued,  and  are  now  no  longer  credible, 


OP    NATURALISM.  501 

and  presses  the  inference  that,  being  now  incredible,  they 
never  were  any  less  so ;  that  pushing  them  back,  in  time, 
is  only  a  trick  to  get  their  incredibility  so  far  off  that  we 
shall  not  feel  it,  and  that  the  only  ingenuous  conclusion  is 
that,  not  occurring  now,  they  never  did  occur.  It  is  cer- 
tainly a  very  remarkable  turn,  as  I  think  any  one  must 
admit,  that  supernatural  facts,  being  credible  down  to 
some  certain  year  of  the  world's  almanac,  then  begin  to 
be  incredible ;  incredible  in  their  very  nature,  so  that  any 
one  who  pretends  to  believe  in  them  is,  of  course,  to  be 
set  down  as  an  enthusiast,  or  a  charlatan.  Mr.  Parker 
takes  the  assumption  tendered,  and  reasons  from  it.  I 
reject  the  assumption,  and  his  inferences  with  it. 

Mr.  Parker  has  much  to  say  of  inspiration.  He  be- 
lieves that  every  man  will  be  inspired  under  fixed  laws 
of  nature,  just  according  to  his  goodness.  In  maintaining 
that  all  God's  supernatural  works,  which  include  inspira- 
tions, of  course,  are  ordered  by  fixed  laws,  I  may  seem  to 
coincide.  But  the  fixed  laws  of  intelligence  or  counsel, 
the  laws  of  reason  as  related  to  his  end,  are  a  very  differ- 
ent matter  from  the  fixed  laws  of  causality  in  nature. 
Besides,  if  we  look  at  the  question  with  Christian  eyes, 
there  appears  to  be  a  little  inversion  of  method  in  the 
doctrine  that,  if  men  will  be  good,  they  shall  be  rewarded 
by  a  consequent  inspiration.  It  would  be  as  much  more 
rational,  as  it  is  more  Christian,  to  put  the  inspiration  in 
advance  of  the  goodness,  and  say  that  men  will  be  good 

t— >  /  */  o 

accordingly  as  God  inspires  them.  Not  even  this  will 
hold,  however,  for  God  no  doubt  exerts  an  inspiring  force 
in  men,  to  make  them  good,  which  tkey  may  even  fatally 
obstruct  by  their  perversity.  The  true  doctrine  of  inspi- 
ration can  not  be  stated  in  any  such  summary  manner. 


502      HOW  EELATED  TO  THE  METHOD 

All  inspirations  are  acts  of  divine  sovereignty,  under  laws 
of  reason  which  regulate  that  sovereignty.  And  then 
there  are  two  modes  of  inspiration,  one  that  is  concerned 
to  re-establish  the  normal  state  of  being,  or  the  state  of 
divine  consciousness,  in  which  the  soul,  as  a  free  spirit, 
comes  to  abide  and  live  in  the  divine  movement,  and  is 
kept,  strengthened,  guided,  exalted,  by  the  inward  revela- 
tion of  God ;  where  it  may  be  truly  said  that  the  soul  is 
inspired,  accordingly  as  it  yields  itself  conformably  to 
God's  will,  and  trustfully  to  the  inspiring  grace.  The 
other  mode  of  inspiration  may  be  called  the  inspiration 
of  use ;  where  the  doctrine  is,  that  God  inspires  men,  ac- 
cording to  the  use  he  will  make  of  them.  And  here  the 
kinds,  or  qualities,  are  as  many  as  the  uses.  He  inspires 
the  shepherd,  Amos,  not  to  write  Isaiah's  prophecy,  but 
the  prophecy  of  Amos.  He  inspires  Bezaleel  to  devise 
cunning  works,  to  work  in  gold,  and  in  silver,  and  in 
brass,  and  in  cutting  of  stones,  and  Moses  to  be  the  leader 
and  lawgiver  of  his  people.  He  will  give  the  same  man 
a  variable  inspiration,  setting  Paul,  for  example,  in  one 
mood  of  power,  when  he  lays  his  scorching  rebuke  on  the 
head  of  the  Corinthians,  and  in  a  very  different,  when  he 
chants,  in  the  fifteenth  chapter,  his  sublime  lyric  on  the 
resurrection.  It  is  doubtless  true,  also,  that,  as  God  has  a 
place  and  a  use  for  every  man,  so  he  has  an  inspiration 
for  him ;  adding  honor  thus,  and  comfort,  and  capacity, 
to  every  employment.  The  degree  also  of  this  inspira- 
tion may  be  supposed  to  have  some  fixed  relation  to  the 
faith  and  faithfulness  of  the  subject ;  though  it  is  difficult 
to  say  what  we  mean  by  degrees,  where  the  kinds  are  and 
must  be  different.  The  doctrine  of  Mr.  Parker  wholly 
ignores  or  disallows  this  inspiration  of  use,  and  recognizes 


OF    NATUBALISM.  503 

nothing  but  the  inspiration  of  character.  If  a  prophet, 
therefore,  writes  a  book  of  scripture,  with  a  higher  inspi- 
ration than  another  man  has,  who  writes  nothing,  it  is 
because  he  is  a  better  man.  Let  all  men  be  good  then, 
and  all  will  be  able  to  write  as  good  books  as  he.  A 
very  convenient  and  short  way  of  letting  down  the  honors 
of  scripture ;  but  it  may  be  that  God  wants  only  a  few  men 
for  this  particular  use,  or  to  write  books  of  scripture ;  as 
he  wanted  only  one  to  be  a  Moses,  and  one  to  be  a  Bezaleel. 
And  if  this  be  so,  it  is  very  certain  that  he  will  inspire  as 
many  as  he  wants,  for  the  uses  wanted,  and  no  more.  It 
may  be  that,  as  he  never  wants  another  Moses,  so  he  never 
wants  another  book  of  scripture  written,  and  it  may  be 
that  he  does.  Should  he  ever  want  another,  he  will  be 
able  to  qualify  his  man ;  if  not,  no  other  will  be  quali- 
fied. Meantime,  it  must  be  enough  that  he  will  have  his 
own  counsel,  and  will  aid  and  qualify  all  men  for  the  uses 
he  appoints.  On  this  ground,  it  is  no  such  offense  to  rea- 
son, to  suppose  that  God  has  inspired  particular  men  to 
have  a  part  in  the  written  revelation  of  his  will,  as  Mr. 
Parker  thinks  it  to  be,  and  the  air  of  confidence  he  as- 
sumes, when  setting  forth  the  conditions,  under  which  all 
men  may  have  as  good  or  the  same  inspiration  as  the  wri- 
ters of  scripture,  indicates  rather  a  want  of  due  considera- 
tion, than  a  philosophic  superiority.  God  conducts  things 
to  their  uses  by  laws  of  causality ;  spirits  to  their  uses,  by 
inspirations;  and,  as  the  different  kinds  of  things,  ponder- 
able and  imponderable,  solid  and  fluid,  elastic  and  inelas- 
tic, organic  and  inorganic,  are  kept  to  their  uses  by  differ- 
ent kinds  of  laws,  so  it  is  but  rational  to  believe  that  God 
will  prepare  men  to  their  different  places  and  uses,  by  dif- 
ferent kinds  of  inspiration. 


504     HOW  RELATED  TO  THE  METHOD 

I  make  no  apology,  then,  for  any  look  of  parallelism 
that  may  be  observed,  between  the  shaping  of  my  argu- 
ment and  that  of  Mr.  Parker.  On  the  contrary,  I  prefer 
to  recognize  the  fact,  thus  far  indicated,  that  he  is  pressed 
by  the  real  difficulties  of  the  question,  and  conceives  intel- 
ligently many  of  the  points  that  must  appear,  in  any  gen- 
uinely intellectual  solution.  It  has  sometimes  seemed  to 
me  that,  with  all  his  aversion  to  supernaturalism,  he 
might  as  well  be  satisfied  with  the  general  solution  I  have 
given,  upon  the  footing  of  supernaturalism,  as  with  his 
own  upon  the  footing  of  nature.  Had  he  sufficiently 
weighed  certain  questions  that  are  fundamental,  but 
which  he  virtually  ignores ;  had  he  determined  what  is 
the  exact  definition  of  the  supernatural,  as  related  to  na- 
ture, and,  in  that  manner,  come  upon  the  fact  that  we  act 
supernaturally  ourselves ;  had  he  also  brought  his  mind 
closely  enough  to  the  great  question  of  sin,  to  expel  all 
ambiguity  concerning  it — holding  the  fact  of  sin  as  posi- 
tively, in  the  field  of  criticism,  as  he  does  when  he  attacks 
slavery  as  a  reformer,  and  tracing  that  fact  to  its  legiti- 
mate results — I  see  not  how  he  could  have  escaped  a  differ- 
ent conclusion.  Instead  of  making  nature  the  kingdom 
of  God,  he  would  have  made  it  the  instrument  only,  or 
mere  field  of  the  kingdom ;  a  theater  in  which  the  powers 
of  the  kingdom  have  their  parts.  Instead  of  looking  for 
inspiration  by  the  laws  of  nature,  which,  if  the  word  has 
any  meaning  deeper  than  semblance,  is  even  absurd,  he 
would  have  seen  it  to  be  a  fact  supernatural.  He  would 
have  found  a  place  for  prayer,  better  than  a  dumb-bell 
exercise  before  the  terms  of  natural  causality  and  conse- 
quence. His  remorseless  fidelity  to  a  mistaken  argument 
would  not  have  compelled  him  to  rob  the  Christian  scrip 


OF    NATURAL    THEOLOGY. 

tures  of  their  glorious  distinction,  as  a  revelation  of  God. 
He  would  not  have  been  obliged  to  spot  the  divine  beauty 
of  Christ,  to  reduce  him  to  his  own  human  level,  or  to 
shock  his  own  better  sense  and  that  of  the  world,  by  giv- 
ing out  the  expectation  that  other  and  better  Christs  will 
yet  be  developed,  by  the  progress  of  his  sinful  race. 
Faith  he  would  have  discovered,  as  the  sister  of  reason ; 
grace,  as  the  medicine  of  nature.  In  a  word,  he  would 
have  been  a  Christian  in  his  doctrine,  which  now  he  is 
not ;  for,  if  there  be  any  sufficient,  infallible,  and  always 
applicable  distinction,  that  separates  a  Christian  from  one 
who  is  not,  it  is  the  faith,  practically  held,  of  a  supernat- 
ural grace  or  religion.  There  is  no  vestige  of  Christian 
life  in  the  working-plan  of  nature.  Christianity  exists 
only  to  have  a  remedial  action  upon  the  contents  and  con- 
ditions of  nature.  That  is  development ;  this  is  regenera- 
tion. No  one  fatally  departs  from  Christianity,  who  rests 
the  struggles  of  holy  character  on  help  supernatural  from 
God.  No  one  really  is  in  it,  however  plausible  the  sem- 
blance of  his  approach  to  it,  who  rests  in  the  terms  of 
morality,  or  self-culture,  or  self-magnetizing  practice. 

If  the  argument  we  have  traced  should  be  found  to  have 
established  a  solid  conviction  of  truth,  in  the  supernatural 
facts  and  powers  of  Christianity,  it  will  go  far  to  invert 
the  relative  opinion  of  nature  and  faith  in  all  Christian  be- 
lievers, and  must  therefore  work  important  changes  in  many 
things  pertaining  to  the  interests  of  the  Christian  truth.  It 
must  vary  the  estimate,  for  example,  that  is  currently  held 
of  natural  theology.  It  is  even  a  principal  distinction  of 
our  modern  Christianity,  that  it  has  submitted  itself,  so 
implicitly,  to  the  dominating  ideas  and  fashions  of  the  new 

43 


HOW    BELATED    TO    THE    METHOD 

religion,  science,  or  supposed  science,  that  passes  by  this 
name.  It  is  a  kind  of  revised  Christianity,  a  gospel  that 
is  preached  in  the  method,  set  up  in  the  plane,  satur- 
ated with  the  spirit,  and  even,  where  it  is  not  suspect- 
ed, compounded  of  the  matter,  of  the  science.  The 
Christian  schools  begin  with  natural  theology,  because  it 
is  conceived  to  be  fundamental,  and  the  young  men 
are  long  in  disabusing  themselves  of  their  mistake ;  for 
any  thing  which  can  be  proved  for  religion  out  of  nature, 
and  in  the  field  of  natural  reason,  is  conceived  to  be  spe- 
cially solid,  and  impossible  to  be  doubted  longer.  All 
which  I  call  a  mistake,  however,  not  because  of  any 
positive  mischief  in  deductions  of  this  kind.  The  evil 
suffered  is  due,  not  so  much  to  what  our  natural  theology 
does,  as  to  what  it  requires  to  be  left  undone;  or,  to  be 
more  explicit,  to  the  fact  that  it  requires  all  supernatural 
evidences  to  give  way  to  it,  as  being  themselves  a  more 
questionable  kind  of  verity;  even  as  the  ill-favored  and 
lean  kine  of  Pharaoh's  dream  devoured  those  which  were 
better.  The  opposite  pole  is  represented  here  by  Dr. 
Henry  More,  who  builds  his  argument  for  the  existence  of 
God,  to  a  considerable  degree,  on  the  basis  of  supernatural 
facts;  such  as  dreams,  prophecies,  premonitions,  visions, 
revelations,  and  the  like — a  curious  and  striking  evidence, 
when  viewed  in  contrast  with  our  present  conceptions,  of 
the  change  of  mental  position  that  may  be  wrought  in  the 
thinking  world,  in  a  comparatively  brief  space  of  time. 
The  modern  advances  in  science  compelled  the  change, 
and  it  could  not  be  resisted.  Neither  was  it  desirable  that 
it  should  be ;  for,  when  the  new  theology  Qf  nature  is  once 
qualified,  by  restoring  the  other  pole  of  the  subject,  which 
belongs  more  distinctly  to  Christianity,  it  will  be  found  to 


OF    NATURAL    THEOLOGY.  507 

have  expelled  multitudes  of  superstitious  and  unillumin- 
ated  vagaries,  necessary  to  be  expelled,  before  it  was  pos- 
sible to  hold  the  supernatural  evidences,  in  the  manner  of 
true  intelligence  necessary  to  their  genuine  effect.  Then 
the  two  worlds  of  evidences  are  seen  to  be  complementary 
to  each  other,  and  the  argument  for  God,  the  Christian 
God,  is  complete  as  never  before. 

The  evil  in  our  present  stage  of  thought,  is  that  nat- 
ural theology  has  the  whole  ground  to  itself,  and  the  God 
established,  is  not  a  being  who  meets  the  conditions  of 
Christianity  at  all.  We  get,  of  course,  no  proofs  out  of 
nature,  that  go  farther  than  to  prove  a  God  of  nature,  least 
of  all  do  we  get  any  that  show  him  to  be  acting  super- 
naturally,  to  restore  the  disorders  of  nature.  What  we 
discover  is  a  God,  who  institutes,  is  revealed  by,  and,  as 
many  will  suspect,  is  the  causes  of  nature.  A  latent  pan- 
theism lurks  in  the  argument.  Calling  the  God  we  prove 
a  personal  being,  and  meaning  it  in  good  faith,  we  yet 
find  ourselves  living  before  causes,  and  looking  for  conse- 
quences. We  only  half  believe  in  prayer.  We  expect 
to  be  delivered  of  sin,  by  a  long  course  of  duty  and  self- 
reformation,  that  will  finally  pacify  the  offended  laws  of 
nature,  and  bring  them  on  our  side  again.  That  God  will 
do  any  thing  for  us  Himself,  or  hold  any  terms  of  real 
society  with  us,  we  but  faintly  believe.  That  used  to 
be  the  opinion  of  ancient  times,  but  the  world,  we 
imagine,  is  now  growing  more  philosophical.  The  result 
Is  that,  professing  Christianity,  in  the  most  orthodox  man- 
ner, we  live,  in  natural  theology,  half  way  on  the  road  to 
pantheism.  Even  the  incarnation  and  the  miracles  of 
Jesus  drop  into  a  virtually  dead  faith,  becoming  forms, 
in  place  of  living  and  life-giving  realities. 


508  HOW    BELATED    TO 

And  the  reason  is,  that  our  God,  derived  from  nature, 
is  a  monosyllable  only,  or  at  best  a  mechanical  first  cause, 
and  no  such  being  as  the  soul  wants,  or,  as  Christian- 
ity supposes,  in  its  doctrines  of  regenerated  life,  and  in 
all  its  supernatural  machineries.  Eesting  here,  there- 
fore, or  allowing  ourselves  to  be  retained  by  what  we 
call  our  natural  theology,  Christianity  dies  out  on  our 
hands,  for  the  want  of  a  Christian  God.  And,  according- 
ly, it  is  a  remarkable  fact,  even  of  history,  that  we  have 
lost  faith  in  God,  just  in  proportion  to  the  industry  we 
have  spent  in  proving  his  existence,  by  the  natural  evi- 
dences. First,  because  the  God  we  prove  does  not  meet 
our  living  wants,  being  only  a  name  for  causes,  or  a 
God  of  causes ;  secondly,  because,  in  turning  to  Christian- 
ity for  help,  we  have  rather  to  turn  away  from  the  God 
we  have  proved,  than  toward  Him.  We  may  seem  to 
have  established  the  fact  of  God's  existence,  but  if  God  is 
gained,  Christianity  is  lost! 

There  is  no  relief  to  this  mischief,  but  to  conceive,  at 
the  beginning,  that  nature  is  but  a  fraction  of  the  com- 
plete system  of  God,  and  no  integer;  that  the  true,  living 
God,  beautifully  expressed  in  a  small  way  in  nature,  is  a 
vastly  superior  being  still,  who  holds  the  worlds  of  nature 
in  his  hands,  and  acts  upon  them  as  the  Kectifier,  Eedeem- 
er,  Eegenerator,  and  is  even  more  visibly,  convincingly, 
and  gloriously  expressed  in  Christianity  than  he  is  in  the 
worlds.  Show  Him  at  the  head  of  the  great  kingdom 
of  minds,  compassionate  to  sin,  conversant  with  sinners, 
a  hearer  of  prayer,  an  illuminator  of  experience,  a  deliverer 
from  the  retributions  of  nature,  the  glorious  new-creator 
of  all  the  most  glorious  characters  in  the  world.  Display 
the  self-evidencing  tokens  of  his  feeling  and  work,  as  the 


THE    POSITIVE    INSTITUTIONS.  509 

God  supernatural — God  in  Christ,  reconciling  the  world 
unto  himself.  There  is  more  convincing  evidence  for 
God,  in  the  life  and  passion  of  Jesus,  than  in  all  the  me- 
chanical adaptations  of  the  worlds.  The  God  of  the  Bible 
and  the  Church,  the  God  that  rules  the  world  in  the  inter- 
est of  Christ  and  salvation,  manifested  in  the  divine 
beauty,  and  the  mighty  works  and  heroic  sufferings  of 
his  saints — this  is  the  God  that  speaks  to  our  true  wants. 
Provoke  such  wants,  and  let  him  speak.  This  kind  of 
evidence  restores  the  equilibrium  of  the  mere  natural  evi- 
dences, makes  the  God  established  a  person,  the  true 
living  God,  and  the  supernatural  facts  of  Christianity  are 
sustained  and  not  discredited  by  our  belief  in  Him. 

It  does  not  appear  to  be  suspected  that  our  modern 
tendencies  to  pantheism  are  at  all  related  to  our  over- 
doing in  the  matter  of  natural  theology,  but  it  will  by 
and  by  be  discovered,  that  we  were  greatly  imposed 
upon  by  our  zeal,  and  took  our  ingenuity,  in  this  kind  of 
proof-building,  for  a  good  deal  more  than  it  was  worth. 
Never  is  God  conceived  to  be  really  personal,  till  he  is 
shown  outside  of  nature,  acting  upon  nature,  even  as  we 
do  ourselves.  The  proofs  we  seek  are  genuine,  only  when 
they  correspond,  and  show  us  what  wants  to  be  shown. 

It  is  also  a  matter  of  consequence  in  our  argument, 
as  related  to  the  wants  of  the  age,  that  it  provides  a  place 
for  the  positive  institutions  of  religion,  and  prepares  a 
rational  basis  for  their  authority.  It  is  frequently  re- 
marked that,  for  some  reason,  these  positive  institutions 
are  falling  rapidly  into  disrespect,  as  if  destined  finally  to 
be  quite  lost,  or  sunk  in  oblivion.  Various  reasons  are 
assigned  for  this  fact,  which  amount  to  nothing  more  defi 

43* 


510  HOW    EELATED    TO 

nite,  than  that  such  is  the  spirit  of  the  times.  The  true 
reason  is  the  growth  and  pervading  influence  of  natural- 
ism, which  not  only  does  not  want,  but  excludes  such  in- 
stitutions. This  doctrine  assumed,  they  are  theoretically 
impossible.  As  the  word  institution  itself  indicates,  they 
are  supernatural  creations ;  that  is,  something  set  up  on  the 
world  of  nature,  not  developments  out  of  nature.  Be- 
sides, it  is  the  manner  and  temper  of  naturalism,  to  be 
impatient  of  any  thing,  not  established  in  terms  of  natural 
reason,  and  spurn  it  as  having  no  sufficient  authority. 
Accordingly  it  will  be  seen,  that,  as  we  grow  more 
naturalistic,  just  in  the  same  proportion  do  these  institu- 
tions lose  their  hold  of  us.  What  have  we  to  do  with 
the  church — can  we  not  be  as  good  Christians  out  of 
the  church  as  in  it?  What  signify  the  sacraments,  even 
if  they  were  distinctly  appointed  by  Christ?  they  can  not 
save  us,  and  we  can  well  enough  be  saved  without  them. 
And  what  is  a  holy  day  but  a  needless  restriction,  when 
one  time  ought  to  be  as  holy  as  another?  So  too  of  the 
Bible ;  that,  as  related  to  nature,  is  a  positive  institution. 
And  so  again  of  Christianity  itself,  which  began  to  be  in- 
stituted in  the  ancient  ritual,  and  was  finished,  or  fully 
completed,  when  the  higher  sense  of  that  ritual  was  dis- 
played, in  the  terms  of  the  Christian  salvation.  It  was  set 
up  on  the  world,  by  a  Grod  who  is  not  imprisoned  in  it, 
but  is  acting  on  it  from  without,  to  rescue  it  from  the  ac- 
tion of  its  disordered  causalities.  What  are  all  these  pre- 
tended institutions  of  God,  but  incumbrances  and  en- 
croachments on  our  liberty?  And  what  necessary  use  do 
they  serve?  They  are,  I  answer,  what  body  is  to  soul. 
All  vital  or  vitalizing  powers  are  organific,  and  live  by 
means  of  their  embodiment.  These  institutions  are  the 


THE    POSITIVE    INSTITUTIONS.  511 

body  of  religious  organization,  the  conditions,  in  that 
manner,  of  religious  power  and  perpetuity.  Cast  away 
this  body,  and  religion  is  a  disembodied  ghost  only, 
flitting  across  the  world,  but  never  resting  in  it.  Truth 
becomes  a  vagrant.  Worship  has  no  time  or  seat. 
Preachers  have  no  calling  or  commission.  And  the  no- 
church,  no-observance  people,  come  into  the  world  to 
merely  wear  out  and  die,  without  faith,  without  holy  vir- 
tue, without  great  sentiments  to  conserve  society,  or  illu- 
minate the  night  of  their  virtual  atheism.  If  we  talk  of 
an  "  Absolute  Eeligion,"  that  is  going  to  abide  and  reign 
without  institutions,  it  will  reign  as  Absolute  Vacuity. 
However  eloquently  preached,  for  the  time,  and  however 
promising  the  show  it  makes,  by  works  of  reform  and 
social  philanthropy,  it  will  be  seen  to  organize  nothing, 
and,  when  once  its  aim  is  accomplished  in  the  extinction 
of  all  that  Christianity  organizes,  it  will  simply  cease  to 
work,  as  all  poison  does,  when  the  subject  is  dead. 

That  Christianity  will  utterly  die,  however,  for  this  or 
any  other  cause,  we  are  not  to  believe.  But  the  tendency 
of  our  time  is  one  that  must  be  finally  arrested,  by  one  or 
the  other  of  these  two  methods :  by  restoring  a  distinct 
and  properly  intelligent  faith  in  the  supernatural  reign  of 
Christ,  such  as  I  have  here  undertaken  to  set  forth,  or  else 
by  a  blind  recoil,  such  as  mere  vacuity  and  the  pains  of 
vagrancy  will  instigate.  In  the  first  and  true  method,  we 
shall  have  the  positive  institutions,  holding  them  in  re- 
spect, and  observing  them  in  practice,  because  we  conceive 
a  God  who  is  not  waiting  for  the  development  of  nature, 
but  working  to  regenerate  nature,  by  what  he  can  erect 
upon  it  and  do  in  it.  But  if  religion  gets  no  body  and  no 
organized  state,  by  this  rational  and  true  method,  then  it 


512  HOW    RELATED    TO 

will  have  them  by  a  worse;  for,  when  we  have  gone 
loose  for  a  long  time,  in  this  kind  of  dissipation,  and 
scattered  the  bodv  of  religion  as  fine  dust  on  the  winds, 
there  will  finally  come  a  reaction,  a  painful  want  of  forms, 
observances,  and  organizations,  and  a  greedy,  irrational 
hurrying  back  to  the  church  that  offers  such  a  bountiful 
supply.  The  Absolute  Eeligion  that  excludes  a  church, 
will  conduct  us  back  to  the  Absolute  Church,  and  there, 
as  disappointed  victims  of  one,  we  shall  go  in,  to  be 
busied  and  fooled  by  observances  and  sacraments  of  the 
other,  losing  out  our  intelligence,  and  even  God's  light 
itself  under  an  immense  overgrowth  of  institutions  which 
He  did  not  appoint,  and  which  have  really  no  agreement 
with  His  truth. 

The  conception  we  have  raised  of  Christianity,  as  a 
regenerative  work  and  institution  of  God,  separates  it,  by 
a  wide  chasm,  from  any  mere  scheme  of  philanthropy  or 
social  reform.  As  to  reforms  that  begin  at  the  out- 
side, and  stop  at  the  rectification  of  the  outward  conduct, 
they  may  be  beneficial  or  they  may  not.  There  is  a  de- 
gree of  vice,  and  consequent  misery,  that,  for  the  time, 
incapacitates  the  subject  for  the  reception  of  truth  and 
the  Christian  influences.  There  are  also  external  wrongs 
and  disorders  of  sin,  that  only  represent  to  men  the 
inward  state  of  their  hearts;  holding  up  the  glass  in 
which  they  may  see  themselves ;  and  it  is  no  genuine  in 
terest  of  Christianity  to  get  these  smoothed  away.  It  is 
even  a  great  part  of  God's  wisdom,  in  casting  the  plan  of 
our  life,  that  he  has  set  us  in  conditions  to  bring  out  the 
evil  that  is  in  us.  For  it  is  by  this  medley,  that  we  make, 
of  wrongs,  fears,  pains  of  the  mind,  and  pains  of  the 


MATTERS  OP  SOCIAL  REFORM.       513 

body,  all  the  woes  of  all  shapes  and  sizes  that  follow  at 
the  heels  of  our  sin — by  these  it  is  that  he  dislodges  our 
perversity,  and  draws  us  to  Himself.  If,  therefore,  by  a 
grand  comprehensive  sweep  of  reform,  we  could  get  all 
the  misdoings,  that  we  call  sins,  out  of  sight,  and  the  sin 
of  the  spirit,  as  a  state  separated  from  the  consciousness 
of  God,  shut  in,  so  as  nowhere  to  appear,  it  would  be 
the  greatest  imaginable  misfortune.  We  should  have  a 
race  acting  paradisaically  in  their  behavior,  when  they 
have  no  principle  of  good  in  their  life.  It  is  very  true  that 
no  mere  reform  is  likely  to  reach  this  point ;  for  it  is  very 
certain  that  men  will  do  sins  enough,  or  have  vices 
enough  to  represent  and  shame  their  sin.  And  yet  the 
merely  naturalistic  reformers  go  to  just  this  task;  the 
task,  that  is,  of  an  external  purgation  of  the  world.  This 
is  their  religion,  and  they  take  on  often  such  airs,  in 
what  they  imagine  to  be  the  superior  philanthropy, 
or  the  superior  fidelity  and  boldness  of  their  course, 
that  they  seem  even  to  be  holding  out  a  challenge 
to  Christianity  to  come  and  try,  if  it  can  do  as  much 
as  they!  Are  they  not  going  to  take  care  of  the 
progress  of  society?  Are  they  not  also  going  finally 
to  get  all  the  evils  of  life  away?  Christianity  under- 
takes no  such  thing — unless  by  undertaking  more.  It 
goes  only  a  certain  way  in  the  matter  of  reforms ;  viz., 
far  enough  to  show  its  true  interest  in  every  thing  hu- 
man, and  especially  far  enough  to  get  those  vices  and 
sins  in  hospital,  which,  as  they  continue  to  rage,  take 
away  self-possession,  abate  the  force  of  reason,  and  dis- 
qualify the  subject  for  the  gospel.  But  it  has  a  quiet  per- 
ception of  the  folly  and  absurdity  of  any  plan,  which  ex- 
pects to  smooth  up  the  world  in  its  sin,  or  its  alienation 


514  HOW    BELATED    TO 

from  God.  Back  of  sins,  it  recognizes  sin;  back  of  the 
acts,  a  state  which  they  express  and  represent.  This 
it  regenerates ;  and  so,  working  outward  from  the  inmost 
center,  it  proposes  to  reform  every  thing. 

Great  reforms  are  certainly  wanted.  No  Christian  there- 
fore will  dishonor  the  faith  of  a  supernatural  remedy  in 
Christ,  by  taking  refuge  behind  it,  and  avoiding,  in  that 
manner,  his  responsibilities — how  is  he  going  to  regenerate 
all  the  sin  of  the  world,  when  he  dare  not  speak  of  the  sins  ? 
On  the  other  hand,  he  will  not  be  intimidated  by  the  outcry 
of  the  reformers,  that  upbraid  his  Christian  slowness,  or 
beguiled  by  their  pretentious  airs,  when  they  make  it  a 
religion,  or  even  a  more  superlative  religion,  to  be  doing 
such  prodigious  things  for  society.  Their  appeal  is  to 
public  opinion,  not  to  God.  They  make  their  own 
gospel  as  they  go,  and  have  undertaken,  themselves,  to 
do  such  things  for  the  world,  that  men  will  say,  "behold 
Christianity  was  a  failure !"  The  force  too  by  which 
they  operate  is  in  their  will,  and  this  strikes  fire  into  the 
nitrous  element  of  their  passions,  the  moment  they  en- 
counter resistance.  They  grow  hot  and  violent.  Denun- 
ciation becomes  their  element,  and,  as  numbers  are  added, 
they  run  to  a  genuine  fanaticism.  No  Christian  has  any 
place  on  this  level.  As  far  as  he  undertakes  to  co-operate 
in  reforms,  he  must  do  it  as  one  who  stays  above  with 
Christ,  and  works  with  him ;  retaining  his  passions,  by 
not  loosing  his  will ;  mixing  his  reproofs  with  his  prayers, 
and  moderating  his  ambition  by  resting  his  cause,  in  the 
mighty  power  of  God. 

To  admit,  in  its  full  force,  the  reality  of  our  Christian, 
or  supernatural  relations  to  God,  would  also  very  certainly 


THE    MANNER    OP    PREACHING.  515 

result  in  a  more  apostolic  manner  of  preaching.  For 
preaching  deals  appropriately  in  the  supernatural,  pub- 
lishing to  guilty  souls  what  has  come  into  the  world  from 
above  the  world — Christ  and  his  salvation.  We  ask,  how 
often,  with  real  sadness,  whence  the  remarkable  impotence 
of  preaching  in  our  time  ?  It  is  because  we  concoct  our 
gospels  too  much  in  the  laboratories  of  our  understand- 
ing; because  we  preach  too  many  disquisitions,  and  look  for 
effects  correspondent  only  with  the  natural  forces  exerted. 
True  preaching  is  a  testimony ;  it  offers,  not  things  rea- 
soned, in  any  principal  degree,  but  things  given,  supernat- 
ural things,  testifying  them  as  being  in  their  power,  by  an 
utterance  which  they  fill  and  inspire.  It  brings  new  premi- 
ses, which,  of  course,  no  argument  can  create,  and,  therefore, 
speaks  to  faith.  And,  what  is  most  of  all  peculiar,  it  as- 
sumes the  fact,  in  men,  of  a  religious  nature,  higher  than 
a  merely  thinking  nature,  which,  if  it  can  be  duly  awak- 
ened, cleaves  to  Christ  and  his  salvation  with  an  almost 
irresistible  affinity.  This  religious  nature  is  a  capacity  for 
the  supernatural ;  that  is,  for  the  divinely  supernatural ;  in 
other  words,  it  is  that  quality  by  which  we  become  inspir- 
able  creatures,  permeable  by  God's  life,  as  a  crystal  by  the 
light,  permeable  in  a  sense  that  no  other  creature  is.  In- 
deed, the  great  problem  of  the  gospel  is,  in  one  view,  to 
inspire  us  again,  at  a  point  where  we  are  uninspired ;  to 
permeate  us  again  by  the  divine  nature,  and  make  us  con- 
scious again  of  God.  In  this  view,  it  assumes  to  speak  as 
to  a  want,  and  what  a  want  it  is,  that  a  capacity  even  for 
God,  in  the  soul,  stands  empty!  And  hence  it  is  that  so 
many  infidels  have  been  converted  under  preaching,  that 
went  directly  by  their  doubts,  only  bringing  up  the  mighty 
themes  of  God  and  salvation,  and  throwing  them  in  as 


516  HOW    RELATED    TO 

torches  into  the  dark,  blank  cavern  of  their  empty  heart. 
They  are  not  put  upon  their  reason,  but  the  burning  glow 
of  their  inborn  affinities  for  the  divine  are  kindled,  and 
the  blaze  of  these  overtops  their  speculations,  and  scorches 
them  down  by  its  glare.  Doubtless  there  are  times  and 
occasions,  where  something  may  be  gained  by  raising  a 
trial  before  the  understanding.  But  there  may  also  be 
something  lost,  even  in  cases  where  that  kind  of  issue  is 
fairly  gained.  Many  a  time  nothing  is  wanting,  but  to 
speak  as  to  a  soul  already  hungry  and  thirsty;  or,  if  not 
consciously  so,  ready  to  hunger  and  thirst,  as  soon  as  the 
bread  and  water  of  life  are  presented.  If  the  problem  is 
to  get  souls  under  sin  inspired  again,  which  it  certainly 
is,  then  it  is  required  that  the  preacher  shall  drop  lectur- 
ing on  religion  and  preach  it ;  testify  it,  prophesy  it,  speak 
to  faith  as  being  in  faith,  bring  inspiration  as  being  in- 
spired, and  so  become  the  vehicle,  in  his  own  person, 
of  the  power  he  will  communicate ;  that  he  may  truly  be- 
get in  the  gospel  such  as  will  be  saved  by  it.  No  man  is 
a  preacher,  because  he  has  something  like,  or  about  a  gos- 
pel, in  his  head.  He  really  preaches  only  when  his  person- 
is  the  living  embodiment,  the  inspired  organ  of  the  gos- 
pel; in  that  manner  no  mere  human  power,  but  the 
demonstration  of  a  christly  and  divine  power.  It  is  in 
this  manner  that  preaching  has  had,  in  former  times,  ef- 
fects so  remarkable.  At  present,  we  are  almost  all  under 
the  power,  more  or  less,  of  the  age  in  which  we  live.  In. 
fected  with  naturalism  ourselves  and  having  hearers  that 
are  so,  we  can  hardly  find  what  account  to  make  of  our 
barrenness. 

It  is  also  a  matter  of  consequence  to  be  anticipated,  in  a 


INTELLECTUAL  AND  MORAL   PHILOSOPHY.  517 

just  and  full  establishment  of  supernatural  verities,  that 
intellectual  and  moral  philosophy  are  destined,  in  this 
way,  to  be  finally  christianized ;  and  so,  that  all  science 
will,  at  last,  be  melted  into  unity  with  the  religion  of 
Christ.  Our  professors  of  philosophy  leave  it  to  the  the- 
ologians to  settle  the  question  whether  man  is  a  sinner  or 
not,  and  go  on  to  assume  that  he  is  in  the  normal  state  of 
his  being,  acting  precisely  according  to  his  nature ;  when, 
if  the  theologians  chance  to  doubt  any  of  their  conclu- 
sions, the  reply  is,  that  they  do  not  understand  philosophy. 

Now  it  is  either  true  that  man  is  a  sinner,  or  it  is  not. 
If  he  is  not  a  sinner,  then  he  exists  normally,  and  what  he  is 
in  his  action,  he  is  in  his  nature,  and  a  great  many  questions 
will  be  settled  accordingly.  On  the  other  hand,  if  he  is  a 
sinner,  acting  against  God,  acting  as  he  was  not  made  to 
act,  then  he  is,  by  the  supposition,  a  disordered  nature,  a 
being  in  the  state  of  unnature.  Any  philosophy  therefore 
which  does  not  recognize  the  fact,  but  deduces  his  nature 
from  his  present  demonstrations,  must  be  wholly  at 
fault. 

And  how  different  any  philosophy  of  man  must  be, 
which  ignores  the  fact  of  sin,  from  one  that  does  not,  may 
be  easily  seen.  Let  the  subject  be  the  relation  of  our 
powers  and  capacities  to  our  ideals.  One  who  makes  no 
account  of  sin,  will  say,  develop  the  capacities  and  you 
have  the  ideals — he  will  even  infer  the  capacities  from  the 
ideals.  But  to  one  who  duly  recognizes  sin,  there  is 
nothing  so  sad,  as  the  fact  that  the  mind  flowers  into 
ideals  that  it  can  not  reach,  conceiving  a  beauty,  a  per- 
fectly crystalline  order,  when  it  can  as  little  drag  itself 
into  this  beauty,  this  crystalline  order,  as  it  could  a  shat- 
tered firmament. 

44 


518 

Or,  let  the  subject  be,  what  is  the  nature  of  virtue,  or, 
more  particularly,  whether  self-love  is  the  determining 
motive  in  all  virtue  ?  Taking  it  for  granted  that,  what 
men  do  they  are  made  to  do,  and  finding  that  the 
common  world  of  men  are  actuated  by  self-love  in  their 
virtue,  the  inference  is  that  such  is  the  manner  of  all  vir- 
tue ;  it  is  what  men  do  for  fear,  for  gain,  or  for  some  mat- 
ter of  mere  self-interest;  in  which  virtue  and  vice  are  ex- 
actly alike.  But  one  who  recognizes  the  fact  of  sin, 
immediately  suspects  that  the  self-love  power  enters  into 
men's  virtue,  thus  largely,  because  they  are  sinners.  In 
the  highest,  the  truly  divine  virtue,  he  looks  for  a  sponta- 
neous or  inspired  movement,  where  the  good  is  followed 
because  it  is  good,  the  right  because  it  is  right,  God  be- 
cause He  is  God.  And  the  conclusion  is,  that  what  the 
other  calls  virtue,  is  only  a  form  of  sin. 

Or  again,  the  question  may  be,  what  is  the  perfect  state 
of  man  ?  Ignoring  the  fact  of  sin,  the  conclusion  will  be 
that  he  is  perfected,  in  squaring  himself  by  the  rules 
of  virtue ;  he  is  consummated,  that  is,  in  the  matter  of 
ethics.  But  where  sin  is  taken  into  account,  it  will  be 
recollected  that  men,  as  commonly  observed,  are  out  of 
place  and  out  of  the  true  line  of  experience ;  that  they 
have  departed  from  God,  and  that  their  properly  religious 
nature  is  detained  by  sin,  or  closed  up.  To  be  completely 
filled  with  God  and  perfected  in  the  eternal  movement  of 
God,  in  a  word,  to  be  conscious  of  God,  and  dwell  in  the 
divine  impulse,  or  inspiration — that  is  the  perfect  state. 
He  has  found,  in  other  words,  that  man  is  just  what  he 
most  entirely  omitted  to  be,  or  perhaps  never  once 
thought  of  in  his  fallen  life,  an  inspirable  creature,  hav- 
ing, hi  that  fact,  the  real  summit,  the  grandeur,  and  glorv 


INTELLECTUAL   AND    MORAL    PHILOSOPHY.   519 

of  his  being.  He  culminates  in  God,  not  in  any  rules  of 
ethics.  His  goodness  is  not  the  perfect  drill  he  submits 
to,  and  tries  to  observe,  but  it  is  the  freedom  of  a  sponta- 
neous, inspired,  and  truly  divine  beauty. 

How  different  a  thing  must  it  be,  to  philosophize  about 
a  substance  that  acts  according  to  its  nature,  and  about 
one  that  acts  in  contradiction  both  of  its  nature  and  its 
God!  Doubtless  the  latter  is  a  much  higher  form  of 
being  than  the  other;  for  it  can  not  be  a  thing,  it  can 
be  nothing  less  than  a  power,  glorious  and  transcendent ; 
and  therefore  it  is  that  man,  contemplated  at  just  this 
point  of  sin,  rises  to  a  pitch  of  tragic  sublimity  and 
grandeur,  as  nowhere  else.  Why  then  should  our  philos- 
ophy refuse  to  look  at  him,  just  where  his  real  stature  is 
revealed  ?  When  this  fact  of  sin  is  referred  back  to  the- 
ologians, and  declared,  either  with  or  without  a  sneer,  to 
be  in  their  province,  a  much  greater  compliment  is  paid 
them  than  is  commonly  thought.  It  is  giving  them  up 
all  that  belongs  to  man's  real  greatness,  and  claiming  the 
husk  that  is  left. 

This  separation  of  intellectual  and  moral  philosophy 
from  the  great  religious  problem  of  our  existence,  the 
fact  of  sin,  and  the  want  of  salvation,  is  the  more  remark- 
able, that  it  is  a  descent  from  the  more  dignified  and  no- 
bler conceptions  of  the  ancient  heathen  masters.  It  is 
unnatural,  and  even  unintelligent.  How  can  philosophy, 
dealing  with  a  supernatural  subject,  stand  off  from  the 
facts  of  his  supernatural  history  ?  Endeavoring  to  stay 
by  nature,  and  magnify  the  natural  history,  it  only  takes 
a  brick  for  Babylon,  and  gives  a  science  of  the  brick. 
There  is  to  be  a  speedy  revision  of  this  false  method.  No 
real  philosopher  can  long  ignore  the  supernatural.  Be- 


520  HOW    BELATED    TO 

ligion  then  takes  hold  of  philosophy,  and  sets  it  to  the 
study  of  her  problems.  All  natural  science  will  follow, 
setting  itself  in  affinity  with  things  supernatural.  The 
philosophies  are  then  baptized,  in  being  simply  inducted 
into  a  just  conception  of  the  one  system  of  Grod.  Now 
the  young  minds  trained  in  such  studies  are  not  led 
away,  but  led  directly  up  to  Christ  and  the  glorious  truth 
of  his  mission.  That  mission  is  become  the  pole  star  of 
learning,  and  how  great  the  change  that  must  follow ! 

Once  more  it  appears  to  be  an  important  consequence 
of  the  argument  we  have  instituted,  that,  in  assigning  the 
supernatural  a  definite  place,  and  a  firm,  intellectual 
ground,  it  contributes  a  valuable  aid  to  Christian  experi- 
ence. There  is  a  feeling  widely  prevalent  that  when  we 
talk  of  faith,  we  are  covering  up  the  want  of  intelligence ; 
that  when  we  speak  of  the  supernatural,  we  mean  some- 
thing ghostly,  supplied  by  the  imagination,  and  verified 
only  by  our  superstitions ;  that  when  we  name  the  matter 
of  religious  experience,  we  suppose  a  driveling,  and,  as  it 
were,  forced  submission  of  the  soul,  to  what  a  rational 
philosophy  must  of  course  reject.  All  such  impressions 
will,  I  trust,  be  removed,  as  unworthy  and  really  unjust, 
by  the  argument  I  have  now  presented. 

It  finds  a  place  for  the  supernatural  in  the  scheme  of 
existence  itself;  showing  that  we  ourselves  are  supernat- 
ural agents  as  really,  only  not  in  the  same  degree  of  pow- 
er, as  Christ  in  his  miracles.  It  gets  a  footing,  in  this 
manner,  for  supernatural  facts  and  agencies,  among  the 
known  realities.  More  than  this,  it  shows  that  nature  is 
not,  by  itself,  any  complete  whole  or  real  universe,  but  is 
in  fact  only  a  scaffolding,  the  smallest,  humblest  part  of 


CHRISTIAN    EXPERIENCE.  521 

the  intellectual  whole,  or  system  of  God's  empire;  while, 
on  the  other  hand,  the  supernatural  side  of  his  plan,  con- 
cerned with  free  intelligences,  their  government  and  re- 
demption, and  the  building  of  them  into  a  temple  of  eter- 
nal Love  and  Beauty  round  himself,  comprises  all  the  real 
and  last  ends  of  his  throne. 

Every  thing  is  thus  made  read}''  for  the  best  advances  in 
religious  experience.  For  there  is  a  close  relation,  scarcely 
different  from  identity,  between  faith  and  what  is  called 
experience ;  and  both  are  terms  that  have  a  fixed  refer- 
ence to  the  fact,  that  Christ  and  Christianity  are  supernat- 
ural bestowments.  If  they  could  be  reasoned  out  of 
premises  already  in  the  mind,  they  would  not  require 
faith.  But  Christ  comes  into  the  world  from  without,  to 
bestow  himself  by  a  presentation.  He  is  a  new  premise, 
that  could  not  be  reasoned,  but  must  first  be,  and  then 
can  be  received  only  by  faith.  When  he  is  so  received,  or 
appropriated,  he  is,  of  course,  experienced  or  known  by  ex- 
periment; in  that  manner  verified — he  that  believeth  hath 
the  witness  in  himself.  The  manner,  therefore,  of  this  di- 
vine experience,  called  faith,  is  strictly  Baconian.  And  the 
result  is  an  experimental  knowledge  of  God,  or  an  experi- 
mental acquaintance  with  God,  in  the  reception  of  his  su- 
pernatural communications.  Which  knowledge,  again,  or 
acquaintance,  is,  in  fact,  a  revelation  within,  a  divine 
manifestation,  a  restored  consciousness  of  God ;  or  we  may 
call  it  peace,  joy,  strength,  a  growth  into  the  divine  purity 
— it  is  any  and  all  these  together.  And  it  should  not  be 
strange  that,  in  such  a  participation  of  God,  we  are  lifted, 
empowered,  assimilated,  or  finally  glorified. 

It  will  be  admitted  that  what  is  properly  called  religious 
experience  runs  low  in  our  time.  Even  the  phrase  itself 

44* 


522  HOW    BELATED    TO 

is  carefully  eschewed,  by  many,  as  a  term  of  cant,  that 
lacks,  or  is  suspected  of  lacking,  any  basis  of  intelligence. 
We  learn  to  be  familiar  with  the  phrase  "philosophic  con- 
sciousness," and  speak  with  satisfaction  of  "cultivating 
the  philosophic  consciousness,"  but  religious  experience 
belongs  to  a  lower  class  of  people,  who  can  not  ascend  to 
so  high  a  matter.  One  pertains  to  a  rational  culture,  the 
other  is  a  relic  of  pietism,  now  gone  by,  with  all  but  the 
feebler  minds.  No  fact  presents  the  intellectual  habit  of 
our  time  in  a  more  pitiable  light.  To  get  experience  of 
ourselves,  or  a  practical  consciousness  of  our  own  little 
subjectivity,  we  account  to  be  something  of  importance ; 
but  to  recover,  unfold,  grow  into,  and  become  ennobled 
by  the  consciousness  of  God,  united  to  Him  as  the  all-suf- 
ficient object  and  fullness  of  our  life— this,  we  think,  is 
something  related  to  weakness !  And  to  this  folly  we  are 
shrunk  by  the  wretched  conceit  of  our  naturalism.  What 
if  it  should  happen  to  be  true,  that  we  are  all  inherently 
related  to  God,  having  our  summits  of  thought,  power, 
quality,  greatness  in  Him,  made  to  be  conscious  of  Him 
as  of  ourselves,  and  in  that  nobler  consciousness  to  live  ? 
What  if  this  too  should  happen  to  be  the  truth  waiting  our 
embrace,  at  the  point  of  littleness  and  mere  self-con- 
sciousness sharpened  by  our  sin !  How  sorry  the  picture 
we  make,  when  we  figure  it  in  this  manner,  as  the  super- 
lative wisdom,  to  have  a  cultivated  power  of  self-reflection, 
and  only  another  name  for  weakness  to  speak  of  religious 
experience !  If  I  am  right  in  the  matter  of  my  argument, 
a  very  different  impression  is  justified.  Mere  naturalism 
it  shows,  in  fact,  to  be  a  fraud  against  nature.  It  soundly 
authenticates  the  grand  supernatural  verities  of  the  gospel 
and  of  Christian  experience,  showing  that,  without  them, 


CHRISTIAN    EXPERIENCE.  523 

there  is  no  rational  unity,  even  in  what  we  call  the 
universe. 

The  utmost  confidence  may  now  be  felt,  in  all  the  ex- 
pectations and  exploits  of  faith;  in  prayer,  in  divine  guid- 
ance, in  the  cares  of  a  supernatural  Providence,  in  all  the 
heavenly  gifts.  Clear  of  all  reserve  the  disciple  may 
go  to  his  calling,  as  one  detained  by  no  misgivings,  or  lurk- 
ing suspicions.  And  his  success  will  be  according  to  his 
confidence.  Weakened  by  no  foolish  suspicion  of  being 
at  fault,  intellectually,  he  will  go  on  manfully  and  boldly, 
instructed  always  by  his  experience,  and  advancing  al- 
ways upon  it ;  removing  greater  mountains,  as  he  gets  more 
faith ;  and  giving  all  men  to  see,  who  chance  to  observe  him, 
what  power  and  luster  there  is  in  a  life  thus  hid  with  Christ 
in  God.  Verily,  such  it  is  that  we  want,  as  the  preachers 
and  pastors  and  saints  of  our  time ;  men,  whose  strength  is 
the  joy  of  the  Lord ;  men  who  dwell  in  the  secret  place  of 
the  Most  High ;  men  who  walk  in  glorious  liberty,  living 
no  more  to  themselves,  but  to  Christ  who  bought  them ; 
preaching  Christ  by  their  example,  their  prayers,  their 
prophesyings,  and  witnessing  by  the  blessed  fruits  of  their 
faith,  to  its  ennobling  verity  and  greatness. 

The  argument  we  have  traced,  prepares  also  a  yet  far- 
ther contribution  to  Christian  experience,  in  bringing  more 
distinctly  forward,  the  question  of  a  possible  discovery 
and  statement  of  the  laws  of  the  supernatural.  How 
great  a  change  has  been  wrought  in  the  creative  and  pro- 
ductive processes  of  human  industry,  by  a  scientific  dis- 
covery of  the  laws  of  nature.  The  address  we  make  to 
nature,  and  the  forces  of  nature,  is  now  intelligent,  and 
our  productive  powers  are  as  much  greater,  as  the  forces 
we  harness  are  stronger  and  more  obedient.  The  world 


524  HOW    BELATED    TO 

itself  is  quite  another  world,  displaying  new  and  vastly 
higher  possibilities.  What  now  is  wanted,  in  the  domain 
of  Christian  experience,  is  a  similar  development  of  the 
laws  of  the  supernatural ;  when  a  correspondent  change 
will  be  observed  in  the  productive  forces  and  the  progress- 
ive conquests  of  the  spiritual  life.  When  these  laws  are 
once  developed,  the  men  of  the  kingdom  will  see  it,  as 
never  before,  to  be  a  kingdom,  and  will  know  exactly  by 
what  process  to  be  advanced  and  established  in  it.  It 
will  be  as  when  alchemy  gave  way  to  chemistry,  astrolo- 
gy to  astronomic  computations,  the  divining-rod  and  other 
saws  and  superstitions  of  mining  to  the  intelligent  pros- 
pecting of  geologic  science,  agriculture  in  the  times  of  the 
moon  to  agriculture  in  the  terms  of  experimental  and 
scientific  guidance.  Not  that  any  science  of  supernatural 
things,  or  things  of  religious  experience,  is  possible  to  be 
created,  that  shall  prove  itself  in  the  same  manner,  to  the 
mere  natural  judgment  or  intellect.  It  must  be  a  science, 
if  we  use  that  term,  that  pertains  to  the  higher  realm  of 
the  Spirit.  It  must,  therefore,  stand  in  terms  of  analogy 
and  figure,  which  can  folly  unfold  their  meaning  only  to 
minds  enlightened,  in  a  degree,  by  holy  experience.  It 
must  be  a  contribution  to  faith,  of  the  laws  by  which  it 
may  address  itself  to  the  supernatural  forces  of  grace,  and 
the  manifestations  of  God.  In  the  initial  points  of  faith, 
it  must  approve  itself  to  the  mere  intelligence;  in  points 
farther  on,  it  must  approve  itself,  more  and  more,  to  spir- 
itual insight,  in  its  advanced  stages.  Hitherto  there  has 
been  a  large  mixture  of  superstition  in  religious  experi- 
ence. Proposing  to  get  on  by  application,  it  has  yet 
trusted  more  to  heat  than  to  light.  It  has  looked  for 
visions  and  revelations  without  law.  It  has  been  a  kind 


CHRISTIAN    EXPERIENCE.  525 

of  spiritual  alchemy,  taken  by  wonderful  surprises,  and 
blown  up  as  often  by  fanatical  explosions.  The  progress 
it  has  made  has  been  fantastic,  and  it  has  finally  reached 
the  abiding  place  of  order  and  sobriety,  only  by  a  long 
course  of  eccentricities  and  blindfold  experiments.  There 
has  even  been  a  kind  of  impression,  that  God  himself  is 
irregular,  and,  in  some  good  sense,  capricious  in  his  super- 
natural gifts,  therefore  to  be  reached  by  no  certain  method, 
but  only  by  a  sort  of  adventure,  that  will  some  time 
chance  to  find  Him.  How  different  the  fortunes  of  relig- 
ious experience,  when  it  is  regarded — which,  in  some  fu- 
ture time,  it  will  be — as  a  coming  unto  God  by  the  laws  that 
regulate  His  bestowments ;  when  the  world  of  His  super- 
natural kingdom  is  conceived  to  be  as  truly  under  laws, 
as  the  world  of  nature,  and  these  laws,  accurately  distin- 
guished, enable  the  disciple  to  address  himself  accurately 
to  the  powers  of  grace,  as  now  to  the  forces  of  nature. 

Our  argument  favors  such  an  expectation.  It  brings 
the  supernatural  into  the  grand,  fore-ordinated  circle  of 
existence,  and  makes  it  even  a  central  part  of  that  stu- 
pendous whole,  or  integer,  which  we  call  the  universe. 
It  also  conceives  that  God  works  by  laws  in  the  supernat- 
ural, in  the  incarnation  and  the  miracles  of  Jesus,  in  his 
sacrifice  and  death,  in  the  mission  of  the  Spirit  and  all 
spiritual  gifts.  Indeed,  there  is  no  being  but  a  bad  one,  a 
sinner,  that  is  not  punctually  and  exactly  determined  by 
some  law.  Not  even  the  atoms  of  a  crystal  are  more  ex- 
actly set  by  law,  than  the  thoughts  and  choices  of  a  per- 
fect mind.  And  though  it  be  not  any  law  of  physical 
necessity,  such  as  We  discover  in  the  causalities  of  nature, 
it  is  none  the  less  a  law  of  unalterable  and  undeviating 
control.  In  God  Himself,  it  is  the  law  by  which,  as  pre- 


526  HOW    BELATED    TO 

siding  over  the  thoughts,  the  ends,  and  the  determinations 
of  his  perfect  mind,  the  laws  of  nature  were  themselves 
conceived  and  appointed — the  higher  law  of  his  goodness 
and  his  moral  reason.  Neither  let  it  be  imagined  that 
this  higher  tier  of  law,  which  governs  God,  in  his  super- 
natural dispensations,  is  to  us  inaccessible  or  undiscernible. 
As  the  fall  of  an  apple  showed  to  Newton's  eye  the  law 
that  presides  over  the  remotest  worlds  of  the  physical 
universe,  so  we  shall  find,  not  seldom,  in  the  most  familiar 
principles  of  duty  and  sentiments  of  religion,  things  in 
ourselves,  that  infallibly  interpret  Him.  A  large  infer- 
ence may  be  also  derived  from  the  admitted  fact  of  his  per- 
fection ;  for,  while  nothing  definite  or  certain  can  be  pred- 
icated of  imperfection,  in  a  subject  unknown  as  regards 
its  law,  the  exact,  ideal  perfection  of  God,  like  that  of  the 
astronomic  order,  suffers  a  large  and  free  deduction  re- 
specting all  his  tempers,  ends,  and  methods.  Much  also 
may  be  gathered  from  the  general  economy  of  the  super- 
natural, as  displayed  in  the  work  and  counsel  of  human 
redemption.  Much  is  given  by  express  revelation;  for, 
though  it  is  not  common  to  regard,  as  definite  and  fixed 
laws  of  divine  action,  or  bestowment,  the  familiar  rules 
by  which  our  approach  to  God  is  regulated  in  the  scrip- 
ture, they  do  yet  suppose  that  he  is  regulated  himself  by 
terms  correspondent.  The  rule — to  him  that  hath  shall  be 
given — first  be  reconciled  to  thy  brother — if  two  of  you 
shall  agree  as  touching  any  thing — if  our  heart  condemn 
us  not — if  a  man  hate  his  brother — as  we  forgive  them 
that  trespass  against  us — if  ye  keep  my  commandment — 
if  ye  search  for  me  with  all  the  heart — all  these  conditions 
of  prayer,  and  terms  of  approach  to  God,  are,  in  a  yet 
higher  view,  laws  of  the  Spirit,  supposing  that  God's  gifts 


CHKISTIAN    EXPERIENCE.  527 

themselves  are  dispensable  only  in  terms  that  correspond. 
And  besides  all  these,  a  large  discovery  also  can  be  made 
of  things  supernatural  and  their  laws,  by  our  own  expe- 
rience ;  for,  as  he  that  loveth,  knoweth  God,  so  the  whole 
life  of  faith  IB  an  experience  and  spiritual  discovery  of 
God.  And  no  discovery  of  natural  science  is  more  valid. 
Nor  is  there  any  thing  in  which  a  ripe  Christian  can  do 
more  for  experimental  religion,  than  in  giving  to  the  help 
of  such  as  will  seek  after  God,  a  treatise  drawn  from  all 
these  sources,  on  the  laws  of  God's  supernatural  kingdom 
— the  kingdom  of  grace  and  salvation.  No  other  contri- 
bution to  the  truth  of  Christ  is  so  much  needed,  or  prom- 
ises results  of  so  great  moment.  First,  that  which  is  nat- 
ural, afterward  that  which  is  spiritual.  It  was  necessary 
to  this  higher  kind  of  progress,  that  the  discoveries  of 
natural  science  should  precede,  and  raise  the  expectation 
of  laws  here  also  to  be  verified.  And  when  it  is  done,  as  it 
will  not  be  in  any  brief  space  of  time,  the  world  may  begin 
to  think  of  a  general  consummation  at  hand.  Faith  will 
now  grow  solid,  and  overtop  the  temples  of  reason  with 
its  grandeur.  Eeligious  experience,  conceived  and  proved 
to  be  the  revelation  of  God,  will  become  a  general  embod- 
iment of  the  divine  in  human  history,  fulfilling  the  idea 
of  the  incarnation,  never  till  then  completely  intelligible. 
There  will  be  order  without  constraint,  and  liberty  with- 
out fanaticism.  The  desultory  will  give  place  to  the  reg- 
ular, and  a  kind  of  holy  skill  will  distinguish  all  the  ap- 
proaches of  men  to  God,  and  all  the  works  they  do  in  his 
name.  The  power  of  Christian  piety  will  be  as  much 
greater  than  now,  as  it  knows  how  to  connect  more  cer- 
tainly, and  more  in  the  manner  of  science,  with  the  re- 
sources of  God. 


528     HOW  EELATED  TO  EXPERIENCE. 

Until  then  the  highest  and  even  truest  principles  of 
Christian  experience,  are  likely  to  involve  some  danger  of 
fanaticism.  I  can  not  be  sure  that  persons  will  not 
appear  who,  professing  to  lay  hold  of  points  advanced  in 
this  treatise,  use  them  fanatically,  as  the  fuel  of  their  strange 
fire.  Fanaticism  can  certainly  find  a  shelter  under  it, 
and  gather  out  of  it  many  pretexts  for  extravagance 
and  delusion;  even  as  it  has  done  in  all  ages,  out  of 
Christianity  itself;  but  I  cherish  a  degree  of  confidence, 
that  what  I  have  advanced  will  be  a  contribution  rather 
to  the  intelligence,  than  to  the  delusions,  of  the  Christian 
world.  It  has  been  my  endeavor,  to  put  honor  on  faith — 
to  restore,  if  possible,  the  genuine,  apostolic  faith.  I  have 
even  wished,  shall  I  dare  to  say,  hoped,  that  I  might  do  some- 
thing to  inaugurate  that  faith  in  the  field  of  modern  sci- 
ence, and  claim  for  it  there  that  respect  to  which,  in  the 
sublimity  of  its  reasons,  it  is  entitled.  And  great  will 
be  the  day  when  faith,  laying  hold  of  science  and  rising 
into  intellectual  majesty  with  it,  is  acknowledged  in  the 
glorious  sisterhood  of  a  common  purpose,  and  both  lead 
in  the  realms  they  occupy,  reconciled  to  God,  cleared  of 
the  disorders  and  woes  of  sin,  to  set  them  in  that  final 
unity  which  represents  the  eternal  Headship  of  Christ. 


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